Tricia laughed, hugged Sasha close and rested her chin on top of the little girl’s head. “It’s not that simple, honey,” she said, but just the same, she couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to live under the same roof with Conner. Her body did a déjà vu thing, reliving that kiss they’d shared earlier.
Sasha gave a big sigh. “I’m sorry, Aunt Tricia. For acting like a baby and everything.”
Tricia squeezed her again. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’re allowed to have feelings, you know.”
“I’m going to miss Valentino,” Sasha admitted.
By some unspoken agreement, they both stood up.
“So will I,” Tricia said.
“And I’ll miss you,” the child replied. “I thought I’d gotten used to it, you’ve been away from Seattle for so long, but being here with you, and doing fun stuff—” Sasha fell silent, and Tricia was afraid she’d start to cry again. Afraid both of them would.
So Tricia paused, when they were out of the pantry and standing in Natty’s quiet, fragrant kitchen. She cupped a hand under Sasha’s chin, and gently lifted. “I’ll miss you, too. But we can email, write each other letters, talk on the phone once in a while, and maybe—” she tried to look stern, but a smile broke through “—just maybe—no promises, now—I’ll come to visit.”
Sasha threw both her arms around Tricia’s waist and hugged her hard, clinging a little.
A bittersweet ache filled Tricia, made up of love for this child, for Natty and her lost father and her dog, Rusty. Love for Seattle and for Lonesome Bend, for life itself, so fleeting and so very precious.
Love hurts, she thought, as the wispy strains of an old song drifted up from her memory. That was the paradox—love did hurt, though not always, of course. Yet, just as the poet said, it was surely better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
“Let’s go upstairs and see how Natty’s doing,” Tricia said. “She needs to know you’re all right, for one thing.”
Sasha nodded and led the way, her small hand clasping Tricia’s. They arrived to find Natty looking much restored, her color good and her eyes shining, chatting happily away while Conner stood at the stove, listening and tending a whole new batch of grilled cheese sandwiches.
Sasha went straight to Natty, and the old woman gathered the child into an embrace. Tricia had to look away—if she hadn’t, she would have burst out crying for sure—but as luck or fate would have it, her gaze landed on Conner’s face and stuck there.
Something silent and powerful passed between them; for Tricia, it was as if their two souls had met and joined, in a way their bodies never had, sealing some sacred bargain. Or renewing one that was older than the stars.
Tricia might have thought she was going crazy if she hadn’t seen a flicker of confounded shock ignite in Conner’s eyes. Within half a heartbeat, the look was gone, but it had been there, all right—proof that he’d felt something, too.
Deftly, Conner picked up a spatula and scooped one of the golden-crisp sandwiches he’d made onto a plate, and then carried it over to Natty.
Natty looked up at Tricia, who was still trying to recover her inner equilibrium, and winked. “He even cooks,” she said, as though Conner wasn’t standing right there, hearing every word. “If I were sixty years younger, Tricia McCall, I’d give you a run for your money.”
Tricia’s cheeks blazed.
Conner gave her one of those tilted grins, probably to let her know he was enjoying her obvious discomfort, and Sasha sank into the chair nearest Natty’s and chimed, “That sandwich smells a lot better than the ones Tricia made. Hers were burnt offerings.”
Conner laughed at that, breaking the spell he’d cast over Tricia. “Want one, shortstop?” he asked the child.
“Yes, please,” Sasha said. Like Natty, she appeared to have recovered completely—Tricia was the only one still traumatized.
Conner’s glance slanted to Tricia. “Hungry?” he asked. He had a puzzled expression in his eyes now, and his voice was husky.
Oh, she was hungry, all right—but not for grilled cheese sandwiches.
The air seemed to collapse and then withdraw, leaving a vacuum behind.
“N-No, thanks,” she said.
He dished up a second sandwich and set it before Sasha, who would have dug in immediately if Tricia hadn’t warned, “Wash your hands.”
Sasha sighed dramatically and headed for the bathroom.
“Yes, indeed,” Natty went on, as though there had been no interruption in her observations, “a man who cooks is a rare commodity.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Tricia muttered, mortified all over again.
“You can’t blame a girl for trying,” Natty remarked, singsong.
Tricia set her hands on her hips, wondering which ‘girl’ Natty was referring to—herself or her great-granddaughter. “Oh, yes, you can,” she replied.
Conner interceded skillfully, retrieving his jacket from the back of the chair, shrugging it on with a gesture that could only be described as masculine grace. “I’ll come back for Valentino another time,” he told Tricia, just as Sasha bounded back into the room.
“Good idea,” Tricia said, her voice taut. She was careful not to look directly at Conner. He still didn’t leave. When was the man planning to leave?
All his attention was on Sasha now, and she was about to inhale her grilled cheese. Apparently, the major emotional storm over Valentino’s impending change of address hadn’t done her appetite any harm.
“If I don’t see you again for a while,” Conner told the little girl, “it’s been good to have you around. You be sure to come back and see us as soon as you can.”
To Tricia’s surprise, Sasha suddenly sprang out of her chair, the much-anticipated sandwich temporarily forgotten, it would seem, and propelled herself across the room and into Conner’s arms.
He picked her up, hugged her once and set her down again.
“Goodbye, Conner,” Sasha said solemnly, sounding very grown-up.
He tugged lightly at one of her pigtails. “See you around, kid,” he said.
Sasha went back to her chair and her sandwich.
Natty waggled her fingers at Conner in farewell, a little smile lurking around her mouth but not quite coming in for a landing.
Conner headed for the door and, interestingly, Valentino followed him that far. Conner leaned down to pat the dog’s head once, and say something Tricia didn’t hear, and then he was gone.
“You should marry him, Aunt Tricia,” Sasha announced, talking with her mouth full.
Tricia didn’t reprimand her, either for the breach in table manners or the outrageous statement she’d just made.
“Amen,” Natty agreed. She’d finished her sandwich by then—eaten everything but the crusts, in fact—and now she waved one hand in front of her face as though she were overheated. “Phew,” she said. “It’s tense in here.”
“Thanks to you,” Tricia said dryly, but with a little smile, as she started water running in the sink.
“Oh, quit puttering and sit down,” Natty commanded, when Tricia began washing cereal bowls left over from breakfast. By then, Sasha had finished eating and she and Valentino were in the living room, playing the kinds of games kids and dogs play when they’re indoors.
Tricia sighed, rinsed the suds off her hands, and dried them on a towel. With the big rummage sale over and River’s Bend not only closed for the season, but almost certainly sold, she didn’t exactly have a full agenda for the day. So she sat.
“I’ve been thinking,” Natty began, with soft portent, and she wasn’t smiling now.
Instinctively alarmed, Tricia leaned forward in her chair. Waited.
Few things the old woman could have said would have caught Tricia so off guard as what came out next.
“This drafty old house is getting to be too much for me,” Natty told her, her expression solemn, regarding her levelly. “And I’ve come to the conclusion that Winston a
nd I might be better off in Denver, living with Doris. My sister is getting on in years, you know, and she has only those two little toothless Pomeranians for company.”
Doris was indeed “getting on,” though she was younger than Natty, but Tricia didn’t remark on that, because she was too stunned by her great-grandmother’s calm decision to skip town. For good.
Natty had lived in that house literally all her life. She’d been born in the upstairs bedroom that was now Tricia’s, and, when she married Henry, the two of them had taken up residence there immediately after the honeymoon. Both Natty’s mother and grandmother were still living then, and she’d looked after them until they died.
If she’d said she planned on dying in the same place she was born one time, she’d said it a hundred times. Now, suddenly, she’d decided to take Winston and move to Denver?
Tricia supposed she should have been relieved—just as she should have been happy to sell the Bluebird and River’s Bend. After all, with Valentino slated to be Conner’s dog, and Natty safe and sound in Denver, with her beloved sister, she herself was free to leave Lonesome Bend and resume her old life in Seattle.
Instead, the whole thing gave her a sinking feeling, as though she couldn’t trust her own footing, needed to reach out and grab hold of something to stay upright.
When Tricia didn’t speak right away—she was too busy blinking and swallowing—Natty took her hand, gave it a gentle squeeze. “I was happy in Denver,” she confided quietly. “Doris and I get along very well. We like the same books and the same television programs and, more importantly, we have the same memories.” As Natty went on, her voice grew even quieter, and yet there was conviction in it. “No one else remembers my Henry as well as Doris does, or your grandfather, my son, Walter, or the kind of boy your dad was. When we talk about old times, Tricia, it’s as though we’re back there for a little while, with all our loved ones still around us.”
Tricia’s throat ached. She turned her hand over in Natty’s and held on.
Sasha was right, she thought. Too many things were changing.
“I understand,” she managed, after a hard swallow. She didn’t try to hide the tears standing in her eyes. Natty wouldn’t have missed them, or even have pretended she did. “It’s just—I mean—I didn’t see this coming, that’s all.”
“As you know,” Natty continued, tossing one hasty glance over her shoulder to make sure Sasha was still busy in the living room with Valentino, “Doris and her Albert never had any children. She’s leaving her estate to various charities. But my sister and I both agree that you ought to have the chili recipe, along with this house and my savings, such as they are.”
Tricia didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
Natty, it seemed, had no such problem. She picked up conversational speed, wanting, apparently, to get everything said as quickly as possible. “This house and the chili recipe,” she confided, “are family holdings. That’s why they’re going to you.”
Tricia could only nod. The thought of Natty leaving this house forever, whether for Denver or for the Great Beyond, was painful even to contemplate.
Natty patted Tricia’s hand. “Now, I know you planned on going back to Seattle once you’d sold your father’s businesses, and I wouldn’t think of persuading you otherwise, but I do hope you’ll keep the house until precisely the right buyers come along.”
“H-How will I know?” Tricia choked out, lest Natty start worrying that she’d lost her voice forever. “That the buyers are the right ones, I mean?”
Natty smiled fondly. Looked around her, seeing memories everywhere, it seemed. Good ones. “You’ll know,” she promised. “You’ll just know.”
For a long time, the two kinswomen sat in silence, Natty’s thoughtful and reflective, Tricia’s stricken and forlorn.
Sasha and Valentino popped into the kitchen.
“It’s snowing!” Sasha announced. “It’s actually snowing!”
CONNER SHIVERED ONCE as the first flakes of snow drifted past the windshield of his truck. Winter was a challenge in the high country, where blizzards had been known to bury entire stretches of rangeland, along with houses and barns and whole herds of cattle. Since he’d never taken much interest in skiing or racing around on snowmobiles, Conner hated to see cold weather coming on.
It made every aspect of ranch life just that much harder.
Generators failed. Truck and car motors wouldn’t even turn over, let alone start, well pumps froze and roofs gave way. Even with county snowplows working around the clock, the roads were sometimes impassable for days at a time.
Two years back, Conner had been stuck in a dark, cold house for a full week, while a record-setting storm raged all over that part of Colorado. Fortunately, the tractor still ran, and he’d scraped out a path between the house and the barn, and managed to keep it plowed so he could feed the horses. During that ordeal, Kim and Davis had been coping at their place in pretty much the same way.
The Creeds had sacrificed some twenty head of cattle to that one storm, and they’d have lost more if the Bureau of Land Management hadn’t sent up helicopters to drop bales of hay over a few hundred square miles, so the livestock and the wildlife wouldn’t starve.
Even with all that, though, it wasn’t the cold or the snow that worried Conner most. It was the loneliness, the shrill ache of enforced solitude so deep and so lasting that there were times when a man needed the sound of another human voice almost as desperately as he needed his next breath. It wasn’t the kind of thing people talked about, of course. Not men, anyhow.
Davis and Kim had each other, and most of the folks on surrounding farms and ranches were married, with kids. The year of the big snow, Conner would have been glad even to have Brody around, and that was no small thing.
They’d have argued, for sure, especially shut in by a blizzard, but even butting heads would have been better than that snow-muffled silence.
The flurries increased as he drove out of Lonesome Bend proper and into the countryside. The heater was going, and so was his CD player, but Conner couldn’t seem to shake the blue chill that had settled on him after he left Tricia’s apartment.
He doubled up one fist and struck the steering wheel with the fleshy side, just hard enough for emphasis.
Tricia.
If only he hadn’t kissed her, things might not seem so bleak and hopeless now. But he had kissed her and in the process, he’d stumbled and then fallen headlong, right down the proverbial rabbit hole.
And he was still falling.
It was an internal thing, of course, but Conner had no more control over it than he would have if he plunged into a mile-deep mine shaft. End over end, in slow motion, he fell and fell and fell.
When he reached the ranch road, he was irritated to find the gate standing wide open and dust billowing from under the rear tires of a double-decker semi loaded with impatient cattle. Brody’s old pickup was parked in front of the barn, and he’d saddled a horse and left it to graze on snow-dappled grass, but he was nowhere in sight.
Conner stopped his own truck, got out and shut the gate, swearing under his breath and secretly glad to have something to be pissed off about, because that gave him a respite, however brief, from thinking about winter coming on and Tricia leaving Lonesome Bend forever.
When he noticed that two other semis had arrived ahead of the first one, Conner swore and scrambled behind the wheel again, laid rubber on that dirt driveway getting where he wanted to go.
Brody and the few cowboys who’d be wintering over on the ranch in distant house trailers were herding horses, a great many cows and several Brahma bulls through the gate opening between the corral and the open range.
“What the hell—?” Conner snarled, to nobody in particular, as he sprang out of his truck again and strode toward his brother.
Brody looked a sight, standing there in the swirling snow, covered from his hat brim to his boot soles in good Colorado dirt, and grinning like a fool.
“
I told you I was serious!” he called, over the bawling of the cows, the snorting of the bulls and the whinnying of the horses.
Conner strode over to him, full of a strange and hopeful fury.
Critters streamed past, raising more dust and carrying on like the devil was chasing them with a whip. Only Brody would have unloaded broncos and bulls in the same place at the same time. The man had no patience, no apparent need to do things right, dammit.
In the midst of all that ruckus, Conner didn’t fail to notice that the horses, like the bulls, were big and sturdy and just plain wild. He dragged off his hat, slapped it against his right thigh in a burst of frustration, and then jammed it back onto his head.
“This is a historic moment, little brother,” Brody shouted affably, above the unholy din. “You are witnessing the birth of the Creed Stock Company!”
Conner was torn between chewing the bark off the nearest tree and grabbing Brody by the shirt and slamming him against the nearest hard surface. Since there were no trees handy, he went for the latter choice.
Brody flew back against the weathered gatepost, while his hat went rolling into the path of the controlled stampede. He looked surprised at first, but when he came off that post again, he’d made the switch to pissed off.
He threw a punch at Conner, who ducked it and offered an uppercut as a response. Before it could make contact, though, two of the ranch hands stepped in to drag the brothers apart.
“Now you know that won’t do either one of you any good,” drawled old Clint, who’d worked for their grandfather even before Davis took over the operation. Despite his age, Clint’s hold on Conner was steely, and Brody, restrained by Juan Manuelo, another long-time employee, was in the same fix.
“Just like the old days!” Juan crowed, delighted. “Eh, Clint? Remind you of Davis and Blue, when they were kids?”
“Sure does,” Clint agreed, with a husky chuckle. Then, closer to Conner’s ear and much more quietly, he said, “You promise me you won’t go after Brody, and I’ll let you go.”
Conner’s neck and face were hot; he was aware of the truck drivers and the other cowboys looking on, and he felt like he was sixteen again, and stupid in the bargain.
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