Summertime on the Ranch

by Carolyn Brown

  She scanned down the letter to what Clancy had written. Since leaving high school, he’d graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in geology and chemistry and a minor in education. He’d enlisted in the Air Force and had been stationed in Virginia for most of his four-year career and had gone to graduate school for a master’s degree in education. Just recently he’d come back to Oklahoma and started teaching in an Oklahoma City high school. Under Marital Status, he had marked an X beside Divorced.

  So, he probably had married Melissa after all. But what had happened? By small town society’s rules, Mr. and Mrs. Clancy Morgan were supposed to be living happily ever after. Suddenly Angel wished she had subscribed to the Tishomingo weekly newspaper. Then at least she would have known who’d married whom, who had children, and so forth.

  When her granny had driven their old green pickup truck out of Tishomingo that long-ago fall day, Angel hadn’t even looked back in the rearview mirror for one last glimpse of the place where she’d lived since she was three years old. She hadn’t left anything behind but heartaches, and she didn’t need to look back at the fading lights of town to recapture them. They would be with her forever.

  She looked through the newsletter to see what Billy Joe Summers was doing these days. She hadn’t seen him at the dance even though she’d scanned the ballroom several times to see if there was a six-foot, five-inch gangly man standing shyly on the sidelines. Billy Joe had always been nice to her and that awful night on the sandbar when she’d sat with her feet in the warm water, it had been Billy Joe’s name that Clancy had mentioned so scornfully.

  “Hello again, Mr. Henry.” Angel picked up a worn teddy bear sitting on top of her filing cabinet and held him, just for old times’ sake. Mr. Henry had listened sympathetically to all her tales of woe in the years since she’d been given him for her fifth birthday…and here she was, still feeling sorry for herself.

  She wondered how her memories of Tishomingo could still be so vivid. After all, she hadn’t ever wanted to go back, even though she and her granny had lived there for fifteen years, since the day she’d turned three years old. Angel had spent her babyhood in nearby Kemp, and although they visited her great-grandpa at the farm there a couple of times a year, she couldn’t recollect anything about her earliest years.

  When Angel had turned eighteen, her great-grandpa Poppa John had died, and left his twenty acres to his only child—Angel’s grandmother. After his estate had been settled, she and her granny had left Tishomingo and gone back to Kemp. And it hadn’t happened a minute too soon, in anyone’s opinion. Memories flooded her mind.

  * * *

  “Don’t stay out late, Angela. We’ve got to pack in the morning,” her granny had reminded her. “Got to be out of the house before midnight or pay more rent, you know.”

  “I know.” Angela had gone out the front door and walked west toward the dam. All summer she’d gone swimming every evening in Pennington Creek, and it was a good thing August had arrived, because her bikini was beginning to look as worn-out as her jeans. Most times it seemed like just a hop, skip, and a jump from her house to the swimming hole, but that evening the walk seemed to take forever.

  Angel had shimmied out of her shorts and shirt, tugged the top of her bikini down and the bottoms up before she sat down on the sand bar and waited for Clancy. She picked up a twig and drew an interlocking heart in the sand. She put her initial in one heart, Clancy’s in the second one, and wrote baby in the part that interlocked. She loved him, and he loved her. The secret that they had been hiding all summer would come out as soon as she told him her news. Sure, they were young, but she had a scholarship, and he didn’t have to go to Oklahoma University. The important thing was that they would be together.

  She soaked her feet in the lukewarm water while she waited. Clancy wouldn’t be there for another half-hour so she thought about all the scenarios lying ahead. She’d known the first time they’d accidentally met each other in this very place that she was flirting with big trouble, but she’d been in love with Clancy Morgan since kindergarten. If he would just touch her hand or kiss her one time before she moved away, she could survive forever on the memories. That he didn’t want anyone to know they were dating stung a little, but now their secret would be out in the public. Clancy was a good guy. He would do the right thing.

  She was so deep in her thoughts that she barely heard the car tires crunching on gravel when he drove up close to the sand bar. She quickly ran a hand over the heart she had drawn. He was a smart guy. If he saw the secret in the sand, he would know immediately why she was smiling so big. She wanted to tell him and then feel his arms around her, and hear him telling her that everything would be fine.

  Clancy plopped down on the sandbar beside her. Usually he drew her into his arms and kissed her the minute he arrived, but not that night. “We need to talk, Angela.”

  “Yes, we do,” she said as she scooted over closer to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’ll go first. I’m pregnant.”

  Her heart broke when he pushed her away. There had been a big fight. And her heart shattered into a million pieces when he said, “I can’t marry you or even live with you. Billy Joe has been in love with you since first grade. He won’t care if the baby isn’t really his.”

  “Go to hell, Clancy,” she’d found enough courage to say. “I don’t need you anyway. I can take care of myself. They don’t stone women for being single mamas, so just go.”

  With a shrug, he had turned and jogged up the bank to his car. She had watched the trail of dust follow him all the way to where he turned left to cross the bridge, and when it was out of sight, Angela had buried her face in her hands and sobbed, heartbroken and alone.

  * * *

  Angel pulled her thoughts back to the present and wiped away the tears. She returned to the newsletter and flipped through until she found Billy Joe’s bio. He was living in San Francisco where he was working as a computer technician. Under Comments he had written: I want to tell Angela Conrad hello wherever she is. She was the only person who treated me like an equal, and I have often thought of her. She was the one who told me to stop drinking years ago and got me on the road to recovery. Since then, I have come out of the closet and have a wonderful companion, Stephen. We are both very active in the gay rights movement and have had articles published in several papers and magazines.

  Her amused response started as a weak giggle, grew into a chuckle, and then a full-fledged roar. So Billy Joe had finally come out with the news. She hoped Clancy Morgan had read Billy Joe’s contribution to the alumni newsletter. Perhaps it would help him remember his asinine remark to her that long-ago night beside Pennington Creek.

  * * *

  Clancy let himself into the house where he had grown up. His father had died while he was in Virginia with the Air Force and now his mother lived there alone. She was already sleeping and he tiptoed to the dining room, where he turned on the light above the table and set his newsletter down.

  He put on a pot of coffee, and when it finished dripping, he poured himself a mug, sat down at the table, and turned to Angela Conrad’s brief bio. His heart fluttered softly, then dropped to a dull ache when he read what she’d written. He still didn’t know anything, except that she probably lived in Denison, since she gave a box number there. She’d given no personal information and Clancy wondered if she was married, single, or divorced. She didn’t mention it if she had a child or children, and she was still using her maiden name.

  Clancy burned his lip on the hot coffee and swore softly. “Damn it all,” he muttered, but he was angry with more than the coffee. He was mad at himself all over again as he remembered that hot August night when he’d gone to see her to break it off. Angela had been waiting for him in her usual place, with her feet in the water, wearing the same bikini that she’d worn all summer. Her jean shorts and that orange T-shirt that was too big for her w
ere tossed up on the creek bank. Her brown curls were pulled back into a ponytail and she looked like a little girl. But then she was only five feet three inches tall and barely weighed a hundred and ten pounds.

  He remembered telling her to marry Billy Joe Summers and her telling him to go to hell. And he’d never seen her again, from that night until now.

  That night he’d gone to the Dairy Queen. Melissa was there and had flirted with him. They both wound up at Oklahoma University, and started dating during the first semester. At the end of the first semester, he had casually asked a former classmate about Billy Joe and Angela and learned that both had left Tishomingo at about the same time, and that was all anyone knew.

  He and Melissa had married right after their college graduation, and she’d taught school while he was in the Air Force. He’d thought they were doing fine until the year she’d come home and told Clancy she wanted out. She’d fallen in love with the principal of her school and they were planning to marry as soon as the divorce was final. That had ended what he’d thought would be a military career. Clancy had come back to Oklahoma, gotten his master’s degree, and landed his present job teaching chemistry at an Oklahoma City high school.

  He turned the pages until he found Billy Joe Summers’ name. Maybe Billy Joe lived in Denison, too…and maybe he’d married Angela after all, and they had had that pack of kids and she and her band played border town dives just to pay the bills.

  But when Clancy read Billy Joe’s page, he felt just plain foolish. Billy Joe was gay, and Angela sure hadn’t looked poor. Two-bit bands that played for border town dives didn’t have customized buses, or smoke machines and their own knock-down stages, and none of them played at alumni reunions either. Angela and her band had done well, although evidently they hadn’t hit the big time. But she and Billy Joe had both done well. And now her name was Angel.

  He’d called her that sometimes, he realized.

  So just what in the hell was she up to? None of your damn business, his conscience told him. You gave up any rights to know what she was doing with her life that August night down by the creek when you were eighteen years old.

  He turned out the light and went to the living room, where he leaned back in his father’s recliner and thought about Angela Conrad. His angel—once upon a time.

  * * *

  Angel turned off her office lights and pulled the door shut. She carried a burgundy leather briefcase in one hand and her laptop bag in the other. She pushed the button for the elevator to take her down to the ground-floor garage where her black Jaguar was parked. It was time to go home. The two-story Conrad Oil Enterprises, Inc., building disappeared in her rearview mirror as she drove to Main Street in Denison and then east on a farm road.

  She thought about the first days when she and the girls had formed the band and played the border town dives in Cartwright, Colbert, Yuba, and Willis. They didn’t even have a name then, just a few instruments and a need to make a couple of dollars on the weekends to keep them in college. That was before Conrad Oil Enterprises had been even a glimmer of an idea.

  One night they’d unloaded their equipment at the Dixie Pixie club in Yuba while an old man wearing faded overalls watched. He swilled his liquor from a Mason jar and said to his wife, a big woman in red stretch pants, “Well, looky here, Momma. There’s a pretty little angel with her honky tonk band. Guess we died and went to heaven.” The old man had named their band right then and Angel wondered if he was even around anymore to know how far she and the Honky Tonk Band had come in the past years.

  She crossed the river bridge and turned left into Hendrix, Oklahoma, then drove several more miles to her farm. It was only twenty acres, but it was home, and home was where her heart was this morning.

  The sun was an orange ball on the horizon when she pulled into the oval driveway. When she opened the car door, she could smell the welcoming fragrance of roses. Jimmy’s gardening skills kept the rosebushes looking wonderful, even if the Oklahoma winds and hot, blistering sun tried to rob the blooms at this time of year. But as she’d told him so many times, his thumbs were greener than spring grass, and he could make silk plants reproduce if he wanted to. The house was dark, but then she hadn’t expected her housekeeper Hilda to be there yet. She didn’t usually arrive until midmorning and then she left in the middle of the afternoon, unless Angel was there and needed her longer.

  Angel opened the gate in the white picket fence surrounding the two-story farmhouse, which looked like it had been there since the turn of the century. But she’d had the house custom-built just four years before. It was her dream house, and Angel loved everything about it. Angel crossed the verandah that wrapped the house on three sides and noticed that the blue morning glories climbing the porch posts were starting to open with the approach of dawn. She unlocked the front door. Coming home early and grabbing a few hours by herself after a gig was just what she needed that morning. She’d wanted closure, but she sure hadn’t gotten any. If anything, she was more agitated than ever.

  She boiled a kettle of water, poured it over green tea leaves in a ceramic pot, and waited for the tea to steep. She propped up her feet on the hassock beside the cold fireplace and watched the sun come up through the French doors leading out onto the patio. As it topped the well house, she could see the silhouette of her first oil well, now standing as a silent sentinel to all that was hers, and the beginning of the successful enterprise known as Conrad Oil, which had grown so fast it still didn’t seem quite real.

  Dawn was gone and a new Sunday was born as she poured her tea into a cup and put a slice of Hilda’s homemade bread in the toaster. Granny would have liked this house. She would have fussed about the cost of it, but she would have grinned that big smile that made her eyes disappear in a face so full of wrinkles it looked like a road map. And she would have turned over in her grave if she knew Angel paid a gardener these days to keep the roses blooming and the morning glories watered, and had a housekeeper. But when Granny had inherited this property from her father and moved with Angel to the original three-room house on this twenty acres, Angel hadn’t owned an oil company.

  Angel buttered the bread with sweet butter. Someday she might have to watch fat grams and calories, but not today. She liked real butter on her toast, just as her granny had. Thoughts of the past flitted through her mind.

  She and her grandmother had arrived with all their belongings in the back of that old rusty green truck that looked like an accident waiting for a place to happen. The old house had only three rooms—a small living room and kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and one bedroom where she and Granny put their twin beds. They’d lived there happily enough until four years later, when her granny had died peacefully in her sleep.

  The preacher had read a poem and the Twenty-third Psalm at the graveside service, and a few church members showed up along with the girls in her band. Three months later, Angel had mortgaged the property and drilled a gusher. From there, she’d taken one giant step after another, until today she was the major stockholder and president of her own oil company, based in Denison, with branch offices in Oklahoma and Louisiana as well.

  Angel closed her eyes. She had all the money she could spend in a lifetime…all the excitement of unexpected success…all the peacefulness of a country home to enjoy for the rest of her life…but none of it would ever ease the cold, blue loneliness in her heart.

  Secrets in the Sand

  On sale July 2021

  About the Author

  Carolyn Brown is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and a RITA finalist. She is the author of more than one hundred novels and novellas, and her books have been translated into nineteen foreign languages.

  She was born in Texas but grew up in southern Oklahoma where she and her husband, Charles, a retired English teacher, make their home. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young.

  Whe
n she’s not writing, Carolyn likes to plot new stories in her backyard with her tom cat, Boots Randolph Terminator Outlaw, who protects the yard from all kinds of wicked varmints…like crickets, locusts, and spiders. Visit Carolyn at carolynbrownbooks.com.

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