Bridge To Happiness

by Jill Barnett

  “You didn’t put me out. Hell, you slept all the way home.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he assured me.

  “Well, at least I wasn’t singing,” I said.

  “I know you think you drank a lot, but you should know the bartender was pouring you doubles. I know Nick. When I spotted you, I asked him what you had been drinking.”

  I looked up at him, surprised. “No wonder I was so blitzed.”

  “Twice as much booze for your money. I expect he thought he was doing you a favor.”

  “Well, Lord knows he wasn’t doing you one. How did I have such lucky timing?”

  “I was playing poker with some buddies and went out through the lounge. I always park in one of the private spots in back of the stage. And there you were, sound asleep on the back corner.”

  “I’m lucky you saw me.”

  His long silence made me wince.

  “Oh, God . . . ” I hung my head in my hand. “I was snoring, wasn’t I?”

  “No one will ever hear it from me,” he said, holding up his hand and he was having trouble keeping a straight face. “Scout’s honor.”

  I laughed. “Were you a Boy Scout?”

  “No. Four H. I raised some calves—who could outsnore you—

  I groaned.

  “—And entered them in a few fairs and shows. At least for a couple of years before the music and partying became my life goals. And it was better that I found you than security.”

  “That’s true. I’ve already been arrested once in the past year. My kids would have a fit,” I admitted and looked up, then waved a hand. “It’s a long story.”

  He sat down across from me and stretched his long legs out in front of him, took a sip of coffee and said, “Well, we’ve got all day and tonight and probably tomorrow for comparing stories. The roads are closed and another storm’s coming in, so make yourself comfortable.”

  The moment his words registered my weak stomach sank and my heart raced. I realized I was sweating. My hair felt damp at the temples, and my face was flushed and hot.

  I blamed the burning fire and my hangover, but I looked into those clear blue eyes of his and felt that same melting feeling I had that night when he was sitting a foot away from me and singing.

  “Checkmate.”

  Rio soundly cleaned my clock at chess three times, but I beat him at checkers. “Okay, that’s it. I give in. Now I have absolutely no ego left.”

  Grinning, he stood and stretched, then hunkered down in front of a raised stone hearth to poke at the fire. Outside the snow fell hard, a white landscape with a few shadows in the distance, big flakes, as if there were a pillow fight in Heaven.

  I looked back at him. “You could have let me win once.”

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I thought you liked challenges.”

  “I do but I like to win more,” I said and put the chess pieces away in a drawer. We played at a lovely antique rosewood game table taking up a corner of the great room, opposite a gorgeous grand piano and between the windows and fireplace, and near the bar.

  One look at the table and I had furniture envy, from the claw and ball feet to the oxblood leather chairs that rolled on roll wheels and swiveled and rocked backwards. When I commented on it he told me it came from a men’s club in New England and probably from England before that. I suspected he hosted many a poker game there, with his bar only a few steps away.

  “You’ve seen me drunk and snoring. You had a laugh. I want one. You owe me something, salve for my crushed pride. Tell me your best story no one knows.”

  “So that press comment I bragged about this morning is coming back to bite me in the ass.”

  “Tell me something funny.”

  “Well, let’s see . . . I think my best story is my ex-wife’s doing.”

  He had an ex-wife, an ex-model girlfriend and son.

  He was smiling, but he looked down and I could tell was thinking back. “I had just come home from four months on the road and had been used to partying hard, coked up, and ignoring her. We’d had a fight and I left and didn’t come home for three days. When I did come home, I passed out on the bed.

  “Krista was so fed up she spent hours with a needle and thread sewing together the top and bottom sheet around me. I woke up late the next day sewed between the sheets.”

  I burst out laughing. “Now that is funny. How long did it take you to get out.

  “Between my muffled shouts?”

  I laughed again. “That’s about the best payback story I’ve heard in a while. I have a friend, Ellie, who caught her first husband with another woman. She sold his yacht, his sports car, and her wedding ring and bought the most lovely canary diamond the size of strawberry.”

  “She had sewed me so tightly I could hardly flex my hand,” he said. And I could see the humor in his eyes as he remembered, which said something about the kind of man he was now.

  “She must have been really angry.”

  “She was, but she was a good woman and she deserved better from me.” He looked so sad, and shook his head. “Beautiful, with a great voice. Krista sang backup for Reba McEntire. Getting mixed up with me was a bad deal for her. She married me wanting more than I was able to give back then. My mama had just died, and I was lost. I married her for all the wrong reasons.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Things work out for the best. After two years of marriage to me, she wanted to get as far away from the entertainment business as she could. She’s been married for fifteen years to an attorney, has a passel of kids, boys, and I expect she’ll raise them to be better husband material than I was.”

  “I have three boys and a girl. And I came from a family of girls, just my older sister and I. Raising boys was more about harnessing all that energy. I swear those boys of mine came out of the womb ready to jump on furniture and bounce off walls, to climb up to the ceilings and scare the hell out of me. Mike had a brother so he understood the boys and the fights. My boys were explorers, and they played really dirty tricks on each other. For a few years, it seemed like we were always at the ER for stitches and broken bones.”

  I told him some of the funnier stories about my sons and my family, and he seemed to want to hear more about the chaos and dynamics of a larger family, especially one of such individual personalities and the closeness in age between the elder two.

  “And now?”

  “Mickey is in his first year at UCLA. He seems happy, but he always was my social animal. My mother used to say he never met a stranger. The older two are married. They run the company, and sometimes try to run my life.” I grew quiet then, not certain why I admitted that last part to him.

  He seemed to soak in my comment. “I guess I could be that way with my mama sometimes. Men are taught to take care of their mothers. Maybe with their dad gone, they take that responsibility all the more seriously.”

  “I know.” I stared down at my hands. “We all seem to worry more about each other now.”

  So tell me about your daughter.”

  “Oh, Molly, Molly. Where do I start?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Molly was her daddy’s girl, from the time she was a baby.”

  “I expect she wrapped him around her little finger.”

  “I suppose. He was good with all the kids. Her brothers claim she terrorizes them into submission.”

  He laughed. “I was an only kid. Just my mama and me. I thought I wanted a sister, but maybe not.”

  “Molly is brilliant and talented. She took to photography, graduated from UCLA, has a great eye, even as a child, and is an amazing photographer.” I smiled as I remembered her reaction and the day I took her to Golden Gate Park and taught her how to work the lens and light meter.

  “Her eye always went to the most subtle things, things the rest of the world might not even see. Everyone thought I was crazy to spend so much money on a Nikon for a ten year old. But I knew it was right for her, and she never gave me a single rea
son to regret that gift. She works at Stone- Morgan, the advertising agency that handles the marketing for the company. And that was how she met Spider Olsen. She was the photographer for the print ads.”

  “Your daughter was the redhead sitting with Olsen.”

  “You noticed her.”

  “You were trying to set me up with her earlier that day, before you knew who I was. And darlin’ except for her hair color, she looks just like you.

  “So everyone tells us. I love that she has my mother’s hair.”

  “When you said your daughter was dating someone older, you left out the fact that he was Spider Olsen.”

  “I know, I know. That’s because since the man’s been dating my daughter, I like to pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  “How’s that working for you?”

  “Not well,” I said and had to laugh. “I suppose I need to let go of it.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty four, almost twenty five. Are you interested now?”

  “Would you want me to be now that you know my past?” He smiled and we both knew the answer.

  “No.” I laughed. “But I live to annoy and protect my children. Just ask her. She’ll tell you.”

  “Like I said before, she’s too young and she looked already taken to me.”

  I groaned and rested my head on the heel of my hand. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That she’s taken.”

  He stood up and held out his hand. “Come on. The snow’s stopped. I’ll show you around the place.”

  I was thankful to get off the subject of Molly and Spider Olsen and put my hand in his and he pulled me up, then through the kitchen to a hallway at the back of the house ending in a large mud room with tumbled stone floors, a separate bath and laundry room and a door that led outside.

  “You’ll need these. The snow’s deep,” he said and handed me some heavy duty snow boots. My coat and hat and cashmere scarf hung from nearby hooks.

  Just outside was a covered area that faced a wide open plain of fresh snow broken only by an occasional glimpse of rock and split wood fence and beyond that, a huge multi story barn-like structure flanked on each side by two other long buildings.

  The snow was deep and we trudged through together, our breath frosting into white wisps in the cold air and our gloved fingers laced together as he guided me.

  Opening the barn door he said, “In addition to the barn, my recording studio and offices are here.” He gestured to one of the side buildings. It was a smaller version of the house and barn made of stone, wood, and glass. “That’s a full guest house. Artists and musicians can stay in either of houses here.”

  We went upstairs to where there were three offices, the last and largest one with a wide custom desk of glossy dark wood and cowhide leather furniture near a round conference table and a long glass wall that looked out toward the northern plains and towering Sierra mountain range, completely white with snow.

  “This is your office,” I said with a sense of awe, walking to the broad window and looking out at that incredible view for a moment. Smiling to myself, I turned and leaned casually against the credenza. “When you said ranch, I was thinking clapboard house with a porch, a fenced pasture, and a small barn,” I admitted.

  “Better than the image of a double wide trailer?” he said, and I laughed. “I didn’t blow all the money, only my reputation and singing career.”

  “Only blew those, huh?”

  He laughed and I realized I was relaxed and this was easy. I was enjoying myself. It felt good not to be me, the mother, me, the March I saw day in and day out, that wounded woman who stared back at me from the mirror, and who I was damned tired of seeing.

  On the walls were displays of the music awards and plaques, records and framed parchments; it was obvious he was an extremely successful and award winning music producer. I had no idea the number of multi gold and platinum selling albums he was responsible for, but I owned a number of them. In a game of what’s on your iPod? at least two of the albums would be at the top for the list for most people.

  He took me down into the studio, which looked like the NASA Command Center, and then he playfully shoved me in a recording booth.

  “Sit,” he said. “This’ll be fun.”

  “Oh, yeah . . . fun like a root canal fun. You haven’t heard me sing.”

  “Yes I have,” he said closing the door.

  “You haven’t heard me sing into a microphone,” I yelled out to him. “My kids won’t let me near the karaoke machine.”

  He was in the control room. Through the glass I saw him flicking switches and his low, sweet voice came in over a sound system. “Sing something.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” I said and I could hear my voice in the depths of the mike system.

  “Come on, darlin’.”

  Sitting on a stool with a profession microphone hanging in front of me, I took a deep breath and launched into a breathy, a cappella vocal of Happy Birthday, Mister President and made him laugh. After I butchered the song as Phillip claimed I butchered all songs, Rio called me inside the control room so I could watch as he added background, manipulated and mixed the tracks until when he played the cut, and I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  “Now that’s what I need for karaoke,” I said, spinning happily around in a large leather chair and examining the bells and whistles of all the dizzying amounts of electronic and digital equipment in the room. “I need something like this to keep me from embarrassing my kids and myself.”

  We left and went down into the barn itself, a full working barn with stalls and tack rooms and its own equine veterinary medical and dental facility in the back. The pride in his voice as he showed me his place was something I recognized. After years of living with men, with Mike and my sons, and of being a large part of our family business and the understanding of it, I got it that most men defined themselves by their work, measured their success and failure in terms of their jobs and professions, very differently from how most women defined success.

  I didn’t know if I was intimidated or impressed, but I think I was a little of both. There was no boastfulness or self-glorification in Rio’s attitude. More over, he was sharing his enthusiasm for his love of what he did, allowing me to look inside to the real Rio Paxton. That he was sharing all this, and himself, with me gave me a warm feeling I couldn’t explain, and frankly, didn’t want to think about for too long. I was merely lonely.

  Ten minutes later, laughing like I hadn’t in so very long, I was on the back of a snowmobile, hat pulled down tightly on my head, my arms around Rio’s waist and my hands stuffed into his fleece-lined jacket pockets, as we sped across the wide open fields of untouched snow. He gave me the ride the my life, spinning and making tight circles and figure eights, revving up the engine and taking off so fast I had to bury my head in his shoulder and hang on for dear life.

  We rode like crazy over a series of low hills, whoop-de-dos, he called them, up then down and down and skidding sideways down the steeper ones, before he turned around and took me back the way we had come, only faster, finally speeding toward the last hill so fast we crested it at full speed.

  Without slowing at all we flew over the top, me shrieking and laughing and half frightened, not knowing what he was going to do next. I never knew a snowmobile could be so much fun: all the highs and lows and fast, unexpected spins of an amusement ride.

  Coming nearer the house, he stopped where a wooden bench almost covered in snow had been built under a sprawling, lone heritage oak, on a rise, so land and hills and mountains were all there before my eyes. “This is amazingly lovely,” I said quietly.

  “I built the bench exactly here, because this is my favorite spot. Before I ever built the buildings, this bench was here. When things get to me or I forget who I am, I can come here, to the last best place I can think of, the place where I can see all of the land and mountains and skies, the enormity of it all, and just sitting here reminds how small I am in the whole scheme of th
e world, and that my problems, whatever they are, are even smaller.”

  I absorbed what he said and the view around me, understanding. “I could see how this could be inspiring. Does your music come to you here?”

  He shook his head and said quietly, “The words come to me here.”

  Neither of us said anything. I had the thought that we could both sit there for hours and never say a word to each other. It was one of those places where two people could just be together, a place you could share something beautiful in complete, companionable silence.

  That same silence spilled over us on the ride back toward the barn. I felt wonderful, and I had nothing to say, nothing to be spoken aloud.

  About a hundred feet from the barn, we stopped abruptly. The snowmobile had become stuck as he was trying to ride through a deeper snowdrift. He swore under his breath and put his foot down, as he was playing with the motor, and then it started moving again. Way too fast. Rio and the snowmobile flew forward.

  I didn’t.

  I was flat on my back sprawled in the snow, staring up at the thick gray snow clouds in the sky above me and the beginnings of snowflakes that were starting to fall and stick to my face.

  “March!”

  I could hear the crunch of his boots in the snow, running towards me. I blinked as his face came into my line of vision.

  “Are you okay?” He was sincerely worried, and didn’t see the handful of snow I threw right in his face.

  Laughing, I rolled away, but he was on me, shouting he was “gonna get me and make me pay” laughing and rubbing my face in the snow, me shoveling handfuls of it anywhere I could, mostly his face and ears, and we rolled around like two Labrador puppies until I cried “Uncle!” and gave up, pinned to the snowy ground by his long body on mine.

  Our laughter faded, and I was in deep trouble, looking up at him, feeling things I didn’t think I should be feeling for him as our breathing beat the same fast tattoo. My gaze went from his eyes to his mouth and then I completely forgot to breathe. The silence was fast changing to something else altogether, a powerful emotion, taut as a guitar string there between the two of us.