Montana Cowgirl

by Debra Salonen

  Instead, he gave her two hours of his time and introduced her to one of his rich, influential friends.

  She couldn’t be more confused. Not to mention the fact his touch made her feel more alive than she had in a long, long time. Too bad they were so damn wrong for each other. People didn’t just put their kind of history behind them and play nice again.

  Didn’t happen. She had the scars to prove it.

  Heart racing, Bailey hurried down the hallway.

  “What is all this noise about?”

  She stopped abruptly to try to make sense of the scene before her. OC in his wheelchair, robe open to reveal his narrow chest covered in snowy white hair, his good leg trying to push backward while the nurse advanced toward him, a bulky plastic shell of some sort in her hands.

  “Tell her to take that torture device away, Bailey. I won’t wear it.”

  The woman in teal scrubs with a yellow and orange top looked over her shoulder at Bailey. Her silver hair put her at Bailey’s mother’s age, but Bailey didn’t see a nametag and couldn’t place her.

  “The doctor wants your father to wear the boot three to four hours a day.”

  “When I’m dead. Not before,” OC snapped.

  He’d stopped pushing backwards on the wheels long enough to close his robe. From the smooth, shiny gleam of his hair, Bailey could tell he’d been bathed.

  Bailey walked to the nurse.

  “May I see it?”

  Black webbed straps dangled from the lightweight plastic. A thick spongy padding lined the inside of it. “This thing is huge. Are you sure one size fits all?”

  “The physical therapy people were supposed to fit it to him in the hospital. If he was being too ornery for them to get a good reading, that’s his problem.”

  Bailey carried the boot to the wheelchair and held it up in front of her father’s partial leg. “True. But if it’s the wrong size and that impedes his progress, then it becomes your problem, right?”

  The woman crossed her arms belligerently. Bailey could tell she was ready to draw a line in the sand and die before giving an inch, so she tossed the plastic thingee on the foot of the bed and said, “Why don’t we call it day? You’ve already accomplished so much. I’m sure you and OC are both wiped out.”

  “Will you call the doctor and get this squared away?”

  Bailey held up her hand. “I promise.”

  “Okay.”

  The nurse glared at OC. “A nice wife and a nice daughter. How’d a cantankerous old coot like you get so lucky?”

  “It’s a blinkin’ miracle.”

  The fact he didn’t say his favorite cuss word gave her pause until the nurse chuckled with obvious satisfaction. “Well, at least, I got the no profanity rule into your thick head.”

  The comment made a connection in Bailey’s mind.

  “Mrs. Sharvis? Weren’t you our school nurse back in the day?”

  “That’s right. My first job out of nursing school. After they stopped funding the position, I went into home health care. Never did care for hospitals and sick people that much.”

  “It shows,” OC muttered. “Can I get some help here? I’m tired. I wanna go to sleep and I need a pain pill.”

  Mrs. Sharvis showed Bailey how to steady the bar above the bed so OC could shift his butt from the chair to the bed. She helped him work the remote control to elevate the lower half of the bed and find a comfortable position for his torso. Then, she covered him with a woven cotton blanket and gave him the pill he’d requested.

  Bailey eyed her father’s wheelchair longingly but she forced herself to walk Mrs. Sharvis to the front door.

  “He’s feistier than he lets on. Frankly, I think it’s good medicine to get your patient sorta riled up. So, don’t be alarmed if you hear us shouting at each other. His stump looks good. I think he’s going to be okay.”

  “Really?” She agreed. Too bad she didn’t hold the same degree of optimism for his business.

  “We’ve got a great prosthetics guy. Builds every piece himself. Old school. He’ll be out to see your dad in a few days. They have to shrink the stump to fit where it attaches. OC will be in pain until that toughens up, but eventually he won’t even know his old foot is gone.”

  Bailey doubted that. Body parts didn’t disappear without regret.

  “Thanks for your help today. Did he ask for a cigarette?”

  The woman laughed gruffly. “About fifty times. Tried to bribe me. Threatened to sue me. Even cried a few crocodile tears. Good luck with that.”

  Bailey told her goodbye and closed the door. She texted Louise that all was well then she went to her room to elevate her ankle and think.

  She needed to get organized and make a plan. None of the places Paul showed her were right for her needs at the moment. Troy’s idea of selling from a booth during the Big Marietta Fair made the most sense. But where could she work in the meantime? She needed space to create and store inventory, to package her products and to prepare attractive displays.

  When she closed her eyes, the image of Jenkins’s Fish and Game popped into her mind, along with a memory she hadn’t thought of in years.

  In the early days of the Fish and Game, OC used the entire back half of the building for storage. Originally, the area had served as the kitchen and family room, but gradually clutter took over. Oversize nets hung askew on nails in the sheetrock. Broken rods huddled in one corner like shamed children. Several deer heads sprouted from the walls—gifts from hunters who’d snagged a ten-pointer only to be told by their wives the taxidermy beast didn’t jibe with their home decor.

  One stormy night, she and Paul snuck in, looking for a comfortable and dry spot to make out. The late spring rainstorm that had lasted for three days made the haymow damp, and their favorite place to park in Paul’s small truck inaccessible.

  “Let’s break into Dad’s shop,” Bailey suggested. “The back door latch doesn’t always catch. Dad’s been saying he was going to fix it for weeks, but you know how that goes.”

  To their surprise, the door was unlocked.

  Bailey assumed this meant her dad was on a bender and forgot to close up.

  They parked around the block and ran, their wind-blown umbrellas utterly useless.

  She found a couple of old beach towels some client left behind and draped them over the three square seat cushions Dad used in a boat he borrowed when someone wanted to try lake fishing.

  The spiffy new flashlight Paul picked up at Big Z’s had a dual-purpose feature. He used it to illuminate her way as she made their “nest,” then, once their spot was prepared, it converted to a small lantern, making their area as cozy as a tent.

  “Are you sure OC isn’t coming back?”

  “Worry wart,” she’d teased, already helping Paul out of his Marietta High hoodie. “He’s hunkered down at the Wolf Den, three sheets to the wind by now.”

  Her reassurance seemed to be the green light he needed. With practiced ease, he unzipped her rain jacket and tossed it aside. A few raindrops splashed on his face, and she licked them off.

  Bailey could almost recall the taste. Crisp. Electric. Some magical elixir that made her decide she was ready to go all the way.

  As a mature, pragmatic young woman of the times, she’d visited the free clinic in Bozeman and had a three-month supply of birth control pills. She even carried a few rubbers in her purse, although she’d left that in Paul’s truck.

  Paul hadn’t asked or begged or whined, like a few of the cowboys she’d dated in the past. For that type, two dates and French kissing constituted the quit-being-a-prick-tease-and-screw-me threshold.

  She admired Paul’s patience. She liked him...maybe even loved him, although she had no plans to tell him that. Technically, she wasn’t a virgin. On a dare, she’d stolen a half-empty bottle of booze from her dad and “partied” with the twenty-something lead singer of a country western band that was passing through town. She’d cried afterward. He’d held her until she fell asleep on the motel
bed. In the morning, he was gone and she had a lot of lies to make up to cover her giant mistake. Luckily, he’d insisted on protection and the only lingering gift he’d left her was an even greater aversion to alcohol and the determination to only sleep with someone she knew and really cared for.

  “I want to do it,” she told Paul between kisses.

  He was, hands down, the best kisser. His lips were soft and warm, but not mushy. He took his time and worked his way up to intimacy—instead of ramming his tongue down her throat first thing.

  “Here?”

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t answer but he did pull back and stare at her in a way that made her feel naked and exposed, even though she was still wearing her bra.

  “You’re sure this isn’t about OC? Doing it here would rub his face in the fact he doesn’t control you? Or some sort of Freudian crap?”

  She clutched the sides of her shirt with one hand and pushed the other flat to his bare chest. “Don’t be stupid. This has nothing to do with my dad.”

  Almost as if her words had conjured the devil, the front door banged open and OC’s voice rumbled through the walls. “I swear there’s a frog-gigging stick somewhere in the back room. Haven’t been out for years, and you sure as hell won’t find me standing around in the pouring rain on a night like this, but you can borrow it.”

  Bailey and Paul scrambled like cockroaches, pulling their pads, towels and Paul’s sweatshirt into the gap between the sink and the u-shaped counter.

  With any luck, the gigging pole was somewhere in the opposite direction.

  OC and the potential frog killer tramped through the arch doorway into the former family room.

  Unlike Bailey and Paul, they turned on every light. Paul peeked around the corner while Bailey frantically buttoned her shirt. When he looked at her, his eyes were wide, his lips mouthed the word: shit.

  Bailey leaned around him.

  Her rain jacket hung neatly on the back of a chair. A small puddle formed below, sparking in the glare of the fluorescent light.

  She curled into a ball, her heart pounding harder than when she flew across the finish line after a barrel race.

  Her father had no use for kids, and even less for love. He’d make sure Bailey and Paul were publicly drawn and quartered...whatever that meant.

  When she looked up, she could see Paul preparing to stand and face OC. While a part of her appreciated the heroic gesture, the kid who watched her father berate her mother in a drunken rage panicked. She grabbed his arm with both hands, pulling him against her like an anchor.

  She shook her head and put one finger to her lips. “No,” she mouthed.

  They held each other, fear the glue that bound them tighter than sex probably would have, listening to the bullshit and banter, waiting for the moment OC turned around and spotted her coat.

  “Found it,” the other guy chortled. “Look out Kermit E. Frog, here I come.”

  Bailey braced for the worst.

  She heard the two men return, something fell, a box of some kind.

  “Goddamn it,” OC snarled. “I gotta get in here and clean this place one of these days. Or make my daughter do it. Yeah, I like that idea.”

  She knew at that moment he’d spotted her jacket. The taste in her mouth turned sour. Her heart skipped every other beat as she waited for him grab her from Paul’s arms.

  A moment later, the light flicked off. The front door slammed with a resounding crack and she heard the deadbolt click into place.

  “Holy crap that was close.”

  She didn’t tell Paul the truth because she didn’t know what just happened. Her father chose not to expose them? The man who routinely berated bad drivers, baffled tourists, bumbling store clerks and anyone else who didn’t do things OC Jenkins’s way gave her a pass? “I think we better go.”

  “Why? He’s gone.”

  She looked around, her eyes nearly adjusted to the dark again. “You were right. Picking this place for our first time is a little twisted. I didn’t plan it that way, but...it’s not going to happen.”

  Paul, being Paul, shrugged. “Can I still cop a feel in my truck?”

  She punched him on the arm, but she laughed, too. He always knew how to make her smile.

  All these years later, Bailey sighed and relaxed, bemused by the memory.

  OC never brought up that night, never asked if she’d been there. She and Paul found other places to make out. Their first time happened in the hayloft.

  She honestly couldn’t remember if it was good or so-so. But she knew they got better as spring turned to summer. By the time she found out she was pregnant and they broke up, he could make her quiver like a mare in heat any time he touched her.

  Groaning at the unwelcome sensation that swept through her body, she turned on her side and squeezed her eyes tight. She needed a nap, not a horny stroll down memory lane.

  The last thing she had any business thinking about was a man. She’d messed up her last relationship about as badly as possible—Ross was dead, after all.

  Maureen insisted Ross’s death was not Bailey’s fault.

  She blamed “survivor’s guilt” for the crushing weight Bailey couldn’t shake.

  “When someone close to us dies accidentally, it’s human nature to spend hours, months, years thinking of all the ways we could have prevented the accident from happening. But your hands were not on the wheel, Bailey. You need to let go and move on.”

  As if that were possible. She might have been able to come back from losing Ross—he’d literally separated from her months before the accident. But she would never get over losing Daz. Her horse. Her baby. Her future.

  She’d go on. She’d find meaningful work. She’d channel her passion for rodeo into her western art. She’d sublimate, but she’d never ride again.

  Not without Daz.

  Louise pushed the book cart toward the enclave set aside for the library’s younger readers. Things had changed dramatically since she first started working in the Marietta Community Library. For one thing, computers and eBooks were in hot demand by nearly all of the library’s younger patrons—except for Louise’s readers. The children she served loved to pick up and hold a book in their small hands.

  And Louise never tired of being the one to suggest, “Have you read Thomas the Train, yet? Or, we have a new, must-read Fancy Nancy.” Seeing their eyes light up more than made up for the complaints she heard from patrons who, like Margaret Houghton, the Head Librarian who hired Louise many, many years ago, preferred things to remain the same.

  They never do, she thought, stopping the cart beside the first bookcase.

  She’d barely finished shelving two books when Taylor Harris, the assistant librarian everyone knew had been hired to replace Margaret, stopped beside the cart.

  Taylor, who hailed from Missoula, was twenty-six, ambitious and definitely positioned to move Marietta into the twenty-first century.

  “Hi, Louise. Got a minute?”

  Define a minute. With Taylor, whose enthusiasm often carried her off in several different directions, time became a relative thing.

  “Sure.”

  Louise nudged the cart to one side and walked to the main counter. The library was quiet today. Margaret was in her office with the door closed, probably giving hell to someone who was urging her to step down sooner rather than later. “What’s up?”

  “The Marietta Friends of the Library is planning to set up a booth at the fair and they’d like us to do a couple of readings. You’ll cover the kid stories...something tied into the fair, I presume. And I’ll read something for the grown-ups. Maybe Zane Grey. What do you think?”

  Louise consulted the large, business-type calendar on her desk before answering. She’d blocked off the dates of the Fair, August six through the nineteenth, in yellow.

  Will I be well enough by then to attend?

  She’d done her best to block any thought of her own health issues until Bailey got here. Now, Louise’s fear con
sumed her every waking thought. Even her dreams were tortured by crazy images of horses running loose in the house, obnoxious tow truck drivers allowing her to get behind the wheel of a giant truck...then criticizing her for driving all over the road. She didn’t know what the dreams meant but she’d awaken more exhausted than if she’d spent the night listening to her baby daughter’s every breath.

  “That sounds like a great idea, Taylor. I’m not the only storyteller around, though. We could make a round-robin list. You know like a ReadaThon.”

  “Ooh,” Taylor said, a glimmer of excitement in her eyes. “What a great idea!”

  Louise liked her soon-to-be new boss a lot and admired her foresight, energy and political pragmatism—something Louise lacked. Louise hated having to beg for the crumbs to supplement their operating budget. Taylor Harris simply shrugged and found a way around the bureaucratic loggerhead.

  “By the way, I bumped into Troy, and he told me he met your daughter. I didn’t know she was an artist and craftsperson as well as being a top rodeo rider. I can’t wait to meet her.”

  As a rule, Louise didn’t talk about her family. Even Margaret who signed her paychecks didn’t know how sick Oscar was until Louise used up the last of her vacation days taking him to the doctor.

  Maybe Bailey was right and she’d done herself—and her friends—a disservice by not reaching out to let them help.

  She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out the tooled leather purse Bailey sent her for Christmas. The medium brown tone made the perfect backdrop for the turquoise beads and narrow white quills Bailey had worked into a sunburst design. “She made this for me. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Wow. That’s fabulous. Does she have more?”

  Louise shrugged. “I don’t know how much stock she has with her—she just arrived from California, but she’s talking about hiring some helpers to flesh out her inventory.”

  “Really?”

  Taylor dashed to the community bulletin board near the library’s main door. She returned a second later waving a flier. “I spotted this a few days ago. She should call the woman in charge.”