“Yes, I know it will be.” And she did. Marriage to Wade would be good. Not exciting but good. She couldn’t ask for more.
* * *
As soon as she returned to Kansas City, she purchased fabric and cut out her wedding dress. The gown was finished when, three days before the wedding, Nell ran away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Again! Why did you run away this time, Granny?” June asked.
“I…” Ellen stopped. “That was Nell, not me.”
“But you’re Nell, aren’t you?” June laughed. “I figured that out when you told me how stupid you felt about James. How would you really know unless you were Nell?”
“You’re too smart for your own good,” Ellen said.
“Not so smart. I thought it was pretty obvious. Were you really called Nell instead of Ellen?”
“In those days, yes. Ellen’s my real name, of course. Nell was only a nickname. When I married your grandfather, I thought Ellen sounded more adult. So I asked to be called that. Besides, I was leaving the old days behind. I was starting over with your grandfather.”
“I don’t get it. Why did you run off the third time? Did Wade do something?”
“He didn’t do anything. I came to my senses.”
“Did you leave him for Grandpa Ben? Did you know him in Kansas City? How does he fit into this, anyway? You never mentioned my grandfather in your stories. I don’t get it. Was it just love at first sight with him?”
“Almost. You don’t know how charming your grandfather could be. Or handsome. He still is.” Ellen thought of Ben’s clear brown eyes, his thick hair that was white now, and his hands, square and sensual. “I have to say that ever since I lived in New Mexico, I sure did like cowboys.” She blushed. It was true. How could Wade Moran compete with a cowpoke like Ben?
The two women looked up when they heard a truck turn off the main road to the ranch. “That’ll be Wesley with your grandfather now. I bet Ben remembered you’re here and wanted to get back to see you.” Ellen folded the quilt, which was finished now. She ran her fingers over the fabrics and stopped on one, pointing at it. That scrap was from the first wedding dress, the one Lucy gave her, she told June. It was a pity to cut it up, but most of the fabric was yellowed and dried out. What was the point in saving it? She moved her finger to a bit of heavy brocade with purple flowers in it. “This was the material James gave me for the second wedding dress. See the violets. They haven’t faded.”
“Why did you save that one? I’d have tossed it away. Ugh.” June shuddered.
“I was in such a hurry to leave Denver that I just packed up everything without thinking about it.” There hadn’t been any real reason to throw it away, she said, and after a while, she forgot she had it. She came across it when she was looking for material for June’s quilt. “It really is quite pretty, isn’t it? The purple hasn’t faded the least bit.”
“Didn’t women used to wear purple for mourning?”
“I certainly don’t mourn the fact I didn’t marry James Hamilton,” she said with a laugh, then fingered the scrap. It was the finest material in the quilt. Ellen traced one of the flowers with her fingertip, then studied her hands, which had aged far more than the fabric. But Ben never noticed how old her hands had gotten, and that was all that mattered.
“What about the dress for your marriage to Wade? Which one is that?” June asked.
Ellen looked over the quilt and tapped a yellow silk so pale that it was almost white. “That one.”
“You cut up that dress, too?” June asked.
“No, it was just one of the scraps that were left over. I don’t know what happened to the dress. I left it behind. There’s not much use for a yellow silk dress on a ranch. Besides, I married your grandfather in a hurry and didn’t take much with me. Maybe Claire wore it as a wedding dress.”
“Claire?”
“She married Wade, of course. I felt pretty bad about what I’d done to him. He was such a decent man, and he had been so good to me. In the end, he did better. Claire made him a much better wife than I would have. She was more…” Ellen paused. “More accommodating about his first wife, I guess you’d say. I suspect she was thrilled to marry up, although she really was very fond of him. When I thought about it, I realized she always had been. And Wade, he couldn’t have been too hurt that I ran out on him, because he married Claire four months after I left. They were happy.” Ellen stood when she heard the truck door slam and watched as Wesley got out, then went around to Ben’s side and opened the door for him. Ben waved away the hired man, annoyed that anyone would think he needed help. Still stubborn, Ellen thought.
Ben walked slowly toward the porch. His hat was pulled down over his face, and he was more than a little bowlegged. He grinned when he saw June and Ellen and touched the brim of his hat. Ellen kept her eyes on her husband when she spoke to June. “I’ve always kept in touch with Claire and Wade. They visited the ranch a few years ago. He didn’t once mention his first wife.”
“But who was Grandpa Ben? Is he the reason you ran away from Wade? How did you meet him?” June’s voice was insistent. “Tell me, Granny.”
“That will have to wait for later.” Ellen held out her hand to her husband, who squeezed it.
Ben pecked June’s cheek. “I sure am glad you’re here, little girl. Your Granny and I have missed you. Seeing you get off that plane last night was as good a sight as I’ve seen in a long time.”
Ellen beamed at her husband, glad that for now, at least, his memory was all right.
Ben turned to Ellen then. He removed his hat and kissed her cheek, and then he took his right hand from behind his back and handed her a stem of chamisa. “I picked this on the road. I remember I gave you a chamisa flower a long time ago, Miss Nellie Blue-Eyes,” he said. “You always said chamisa was your favorite.”
“Why, thank you, Buddy.” Ellen held his hand a little longer than necessary before she threaded the stem of the chamisa in the buttonhole of her shirt.
“You better shake it and make sure there’s no bee in it,” he said, glancing at her slyly.
“You don’t forget everything, do you?”
June’s mouth dropped open. “Wait, Granny! You married Buddy? Grandpa Ben is Buddy?”
“You been telling that child tales?” Ben asked. Then he told her, “Doc says Little Texas will be fine. I best put him in the barn and feed him. Then I’ll wash up for supper.”
“Little Texas was the name of Teddy Roosevelt’s horse in Cuba,” Ellen explained to June. “Your grandfather always admired the colonel. His horse, too.”
June brushed that aside. “I want to know how you met Buddy again. I don’t understand.”
“What are you two talking about?” Ben asked.
“Granny was telling me how she ran away from getting married three times.”
“That so? Well, lucky for me she did,” Ben said, his eyes crinkling as he looked at Ellen. “I sure am glad she gave that first fellow another chance.”
“How did it happen?” June asked. “How did the two of you meet again?”
“You tell her,” Ellen told her husband.
Ben took off his hat and combed his hair with his fingers. His skin was burned to leather by the sun. “It was a stroke of luck. That fellow your grandmother was going to marry, Wade Moran his name was. He was my banker. He financed this ranch when I bought it. I was a pretty good customer and made my payments on time. So when I needed money to buy more cattle, I went to see him in Kansas City.”
“And he told you about Granny?”
Ben turned away and stared out across the ranchland for a long time. “What’s that?”
“Wade Moran told you he was going to marry Granny?”
“Did he?” Ben turned to his wife.
Ellen closed her eyes for a moment. She had been so glad he was lucid, but it hadn’t lasted long. He was confused now. She glanced at June, whose eyes were clouded with tears. “Go take care of Little Texas. We’ll wait supper
for you.”
The two watched Ben make for the barn, and Ellen said, “You can see how it comes and goes with him. Usually he’s better when he’s someplace that’s familiar, like the ranch. In town, unless he’s talking to some of his old friends, he’s worse. That’s another reason I want to keep him here as long as I can.”
“It won’t be forever,” June said.
“No.” Ellen didn’t want to think about it anymore.
June waited until her grandfather had disappeared into the barn. “So did Wade Moran tell Grandpa Ben he was going to marry you?”
“Not exactly. Wade didn’t know we knew each other. When I told him about your grandfather, I called him Buddy. Wade knew him as Ben. Like your grandfather said, he went to Wade to finance a cattle purchase. Wade agreed to loan your grandfather the money and said he was in a good mood because he was getting married. Then he picked up that picture of me I’d given him, the one that was taken on the old Rockin’ A in New Mexico. Wade had put it into a silver frame.” Ellen laughed. “He sent it to your grandfather later as a wedding present. Not right away, however. It was after he married Claire.
“When your grandfather saw the picture on Wade’s desk, he said, ‘Ain’t that a dinger?’ He never let on that we knew each other, just got Wade to tell him about me. Wade said I was a schoolteacher and even named the school. Ben was so stunned at what Wade told him that instead of going out to dinner, which they usually did when he was in Kansas City, he said he was feeling poorly and wanted to go back to his hotel. Poor Wade—your grandfather told me later, ‘If he hadn’t had a leaky mouth, he could have married you.’”
“But of course he didn’t. And I bet Grandpa Ben didn’t go back to his hotel either.” June leaned forward in her chair and grinned. “Did he go right to your school?”
“He did. He barged into my schoolroom—well, he barged into half a dozen rooms before he found me—and he grabbed me and said we were getting married that afternoon.”
“That must have thrilled your class.”
“Fortunately, school was out, and the students were gone,” Ellen said.
“Then he hadn’t married Alice?” June asked.
“That’s what I asked. He told me he’d have gone to Texas before he’d marry her. He’d just said it to make me jealous. He wanted me to think he was the whole herd, and when he thought I didn’t, he wanted to hurt me. So he said he was going to marry her. But in truth, I was the only girl he’d ever cared about, and if he couldn’t have me, he wouldn’t marry at all. He told me that letting me go was the biggest mistake of his life.” Ellen reddened and turned away, embarrassed. “That’s what he said, at any rate.”
“I love it, Granny! So you married him right away.”
“That very afternoon. I had on my schoolteacher skirt and white blouse with chalk smears on it and my white apron. I forgot to take it off. I was married in it,” Ellen said. She pointed to the white square she had added to the quilt that morning. “That’s a piece of the sash.”
“Wade must have been furious.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He gave Ben the loan. He could have canceled it, I suppose, but he was a man of integrity.” Ellen glanced at her granddaughter. “He’s been loaning us money ever since.” Ellen stretched out her hand to indicate the ranch. “We wouldn’t have all this without him.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Yes. Claire died a couple of years ago. He wrote just last week that he’d remarried. The whole letter compared his new wife to Claire. I guess he finally got over the first one. I wish Claire knew that.”
June sat for a moment, absently running her hand back and forth over the quilt. “You never stopped loving Grandpa Ben.”
“No,” her grandmother replied. “I never got over Buddy. Of the three men, I was always best with him. I knew the minute he walked into my classroom and grabbed me up that he was the only one I truly wanted to marry.” She blushed a little. “Ben’s his real name, of course. Remember I told you that Buddy was the name of his horse.”
The screen door slammed, and Maria came outside. “There’s somebody on the telephone for Miss June,” she said. The two women had been too caught up in their conversation to hear the ring.
After June went inside, Ellen asked, “Her mother again?”
“No, ma’am. A man.”
“Dave, the fellow who was here last summer?”
Maria shrugged. “He didn’t say.”
Maria went back into the kitchen, but Ellen remained outside, watching for Ben to come out of the barn. The sight of him still warmed her heart, just as it had in New Mexico more than fifty years before. She picked up the quilt and ran her hand over it, pulling off a loose thread and tossing it off the porch, watching the wind pick it up. She’d wait outside for June, too. The girl might want to talk to her, out of earshot of Maria.
Ellen was right. June was on the telephone for a long time before she came back outside. “That was Dave. I guess you know that,” she said. Her mother hadn’t told him where to find her. Dave had figured it out on his own. “He knows this is my favorite place in the whole world, so I guess it wasn’t hard,” she said.
Ellen waited.
“I was wrong to run off like that.” June glanced at her grandmother. “Running away doesn’t solve anything.”
“No. I’m proof of that,” Ellen said. She patted the seat beside her on the swing. “I’m not a very good example.”
June sat down. “Maybe you are, Granny.”
“Did you make any decisions?”
“Actually, we did.”
“Whatever you decide, it will be the right thing. You can learn from my mistake.” She pushed the swing back and forth.
“I don’t think it was a mistake, not running away from James and Wade, anyway.”
“But it was a mistake running off from Buddy.”
“Was it? Maybe losing him made you realize how much you loved him. Buddy sounded pretty stubborn back then.”
“He still is.”
“You are, too, but you seem to work together all right. I can’t help but think maybe he mellowed a little after you left. If you’d married him the first time around, he might never have let you stand up to him. Maybe he learned to value you more and figured he ought to stop telling you what to do.”
Ellen hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe,” she said. She would ponder it later. Right now, she wanted to know about her granddaughter. “So what did you and Dave decide?”
“A lot.” June blew out her breath. “First of all, he agreed we shouldn’t get married next month. He goes along with calling off the wedding.”
Ellen looked down at the wedding quilt. “I guess I can put this away, then, at least for a little while. It’ll be there whenever you marry.”
“I’ll claim it one day, just not right away,” June told her.
“Have you broken up for good?”
“Oh, no.” June turned to her grandmother and put her smooth hand over her grandmother’s sunburned one. “We’re going to wait until Dave’s out of the service to decide. He agreed to that. I didn’t think he would. He said he’s been considering quitting the army ever since that fight.”
“So you’ll take the bank job in Colorado Springs?” Ellen was pleased. June would be only a few hours away, close enough to drive down for vacations or even long weekends. Ben would like that. The two of them could ride up into the mountains. For the first time Ellen saw that June was wearing blue jeans. She’d been so absorbed in the quilt and in her storytelling that she hadn’t noticed. The girl had intended to go riding that day with her grandfather. Ben could still ride even if she couldn’t. Now, living so close, June could accompany him.
“No, I’m not going to take it.”
“Oh.” June tried not to show her disappointment. “Why not?”
“Because I want to move here, to the ranch.”
June almost let the quilt slip out of her grip before she realized it was falling to the floor and grabbed fo
r it. “I don’t understand.”
“That is, if you want me. I can help Grandpa Ben with the cattle and do the ranch work you used to do with him. I could take over some of your chores—keeping the books, for instance. Paying the bills. After all, I took accounting. Dave won’t get out of the army for two years, so I’d be here at least that long. Will you think about it, Granny?”
“I don’t have to,” Ellen said. “You’re a godsend. You being here will give your grandfather two years before we have to move.”
June reached for the quilt, running her finger over the last patch. “Maybe you won’t have to move at all. I told Dave about Grandpa Ben and how he’s failing. Dave said maybe we should think about taking over the ranch and running it for you, maybe buy you out one day. He loved it down here. He said that after he read my note, he got serious about whether he wanted to spend the rest of his life in the military. With his family history, he’d never thought about doing anything else. He got to thinking about it and kind of liked the idea of doing something different. So when his time is up, he’s going to ask for a discharge. Of course, he could change his mind again, but I’d be here for two years—time enough for you to pass on more of your stories—that is, if it’s okay.”
“Okay? Honey, you can stay here the rest of your life. In fact, I hope you do.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, Granny.”
Ellen put her hand to her face and wiped away tears for the second time that day. She was getting to be a foolish old woman. She looked up to see Ben emerge from the barn and walk toward the kitchen. Her eyes followed him until he disappeared around the side of the house. Then she took the quilt from June and put it under her arm and picked up her sewing basket. “You’re right to be cautious, Junie. Marriage lasts a long time. Your grandfather and I have been married almost fifty years,” she mused.
June reached for the scissors that Ellen had left behind and started to open the screen for her grandmother. Then she stopped and laughed. “More than that, Granny. Dad is over fifty.”
Ellen gave an embarrassed smile but didn’t reply.
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