The Cowboy Finds a Family

by Anne McAllister

  Maybe, she thought glumly, it was because she gave him so much practice.

  “Um,” she said. She got to her feet, trying to smile at Felicity to reassure her.

  Felicity didn’t look reassured.

  All of a sudden there was a wail from upstairs. Felicity looked up. The first wail was joined by another one. And followed by the sound of Taggart gritting his teeth. He said a rude word under his breath and nailed Becky with a glare.

  She did her best to sidle out of reach.

  “You get one. I’ll get the other,” Felicity said to Taggart.

  Becky thought she was the one her father wanted to get.

  Taggart stood there, indecisive, his gaze still fixed on Becky. The wails grew louder and more insistent.

  “Oh, hell,” he muttered. “Get to bed. But we’re not finished, Rebecca. Believe me.” Then he followed Felicity up the steps.

  Becky waited until they were both busy with Willy and Abby before she went after them. She climbed the stairs slowly and edged past the twins’ room.

  She could hear the creak of the old rocker her grandma had rocked her in when she was little. She could hear the soft murmur of Felicity’s voice as she soothed the baby she was nursing. She could hear her father’s footsteps as he paced and jiggled and tried to distract the other twin. He was singing softly, too. It was a song she remembered him singing to her when she was little.

  Nobody heard her.

  It was just as well.

  Becky got into bed and slid between the covers. Then she lay there and tried to feel relieved that her dad hadn’t yelled more or swatted her bottom. In the old days he wouldn’t have been so easily distracted. She supposed she ought to be grateful to Willy and Abby for yelling their heads off.

  She twisted against the sheets, hoping to settle in. She tried to feel tired and content, the way she used to feel right after her dad and Felicity got married—as if finally things were all right in her world.

  But things weren’t all right.

  Nothing was all right. And she didn’t know what to do.

  It didn’t seem as easy as the last time she’d had to fix things. Then it had been obvious what the problem was—and how to fix it. All she’d had to do was find her father a wife.

  She’d done that. Now they were supposed to live happily ever after. That was the way it worked.

  Wasn’t it?

  Becky folded her hands and stared at the ceiling. “If this is happily ever after,” she told God, “You’ve got a little work to do.”

  *

  It was the middle of the night and she was still awake and no nearer figuring out how to help God sort things out, when Becky remembered what Felicity had said about Mace and Jenny getting a divorce.

  Becky’s eyes shot open wide as the implications hit.

  Her stomach clenched. So did her toes and fists.

  Did that mean God had been listening to all those childish ramblings she’d shared with Him all those years ago?

  Back then—she must have been five or maybe six—she’d wanted to marry Mace. But Mace was already married. Becky wasn’t sure how to dispose of Jenny until she came up with the idea of them getting a divorce so Jenny could marry her dad.

  Once or twice she might have even prayed for it to happen. Well, all right, she had prayed for it to happen. But that was before she got older and knew better and figured out that just like Felicity was the right woman for her dad, Jenny was the right woman for Mace.

  So she’d stopped praying for it, though she’d never stopped loving Mace.

  So, what was this?

  Some sort of delayed reaction? An incubation period, like when she got the chicken pox a couple of weeks after she’d been exposed to Tuck’s?

  Did God have some sort of divine in-box where her request just kind of got shoved to the back for a few years and only now came to His attention?

  And if so, did that make Mace and Jenny’s divorce her fault? The thought made her stomach hurt.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she told God. “I was just a little kid.”

  If that made any difference to God, He didn’t say. Becky waited, eyes on the ceiling, wishing He’d answer. But all she heard was silence.

  Finally she turned onto her side and curved herself around her pillow with the bronc rider pillowcase and tried to sleep.

  Then she remembered all the nights she’d pretended the pillow was Mace.

  She sat up and deliberately shoved it away.

  She could see it still, though, out of the corner of her eye. Her stomach didn’t hurt now, but it felt hollow and cold where the warmth of the pillow had been. She tried hugging her arms across her chest. It didn’t help.

  She couldn’t go to sleep without her pillow.

  Was Mace sleeping alone tonight wishing he was holding Jenny?

  Becky sat up again and picked up the pillow. She tugged the pillowcase off and set it on the nightstand next to her bed. The pillow looked lumpy and old and sort of forlorn without it. She knew how it felt.

  The ticking scratched her cheek. She didn’t care. She lay it down and settled next to it, curving her body around it once more.

  That felt a little better.

  She could still see the pillowcase. Putting out her hand, she touched the edge of it, rubbed it between her fingers, then closed them over it.

  “It’ll be all right, Mace,” she said softly, hoping it was true.

  She still had the case twined between her fingers when she fell asleep.

  *

  Life went on.

  Wasn’t that what the sitcoms said?

  Of course it did. Jenny knew that.

  “There is life after divorce,” her friend Mary Alice who’d had five husbands, had told her after every one of them. She was getting a perm when Jenny came into Elmer’s little beauty shop for a haircut Thursday afternoon.

  “I’m not getting a divorce,” she told Mary Alice firmly, wondering how on earth Mary Alice knew.

  “Maybe not,” Mary Alice said with a shrug. “But Mace is.” And that’s when Jenny remembered that Mary Alice worked for a law firm in Livingston. Jenny scowled. Guess which one.

  “Not if I don’t agree,” she said flatly.

  Mary Alice made a tsking noise. “That’s where you’re wrong. Doesn’t matter whether you want it or not. This is a no-fault state.”

  Jenny knew there was no fault in hers and Mace’s spilt—unless you counted his pigheadedness. She found out a couple of days later that by “no-fault” a lack of pigheadedness wasn’t what the Montana legislature had in mind.

  What they meant, Jenny learned by going online at the library in Livingston and reading the laws, was that if Mace could prove he and his wife had lived apart for a hundred and eighty days, he could get a divorce from her whether she wanted him to or not.

  “Damn it!” she said aloud.

  Two librarians and a patron jumped.

  “Sorry,” Jenny muttered. She gathered up her things and left, still fuming. How dare legislators mess up her life this way? What did they know about the vagaries of marriages? What did they know about pigheaded, stubborn cowboys who were too damn noble for their own good?

  Nothing, obviously.

  Well, if that was the law, that was the law. She wasn’t going to be able to get it changed. Not within a hundred and eighty days, anyway.

  So she had—she calculated as she hurried back to her car—a hundred and sixty-four days to change her misguided husband’s mind.

  Even for a man as stubborn as Mace, surely that would be enough.

  Chapter Four

  On Saturday morning when Mace showed up at Taggart’s to help out with the bull-riding school, everyone knew.

  Not about his infertility—he still could barely make himself think the word—he knew Jenny wouldn’t have betrayed his privacy about that. But she had obviously told people they weren’t together anymore.

  He could see disapproval in the hard stares Taggart and his business part
ner and friend bronc rider Noah Tanner gave him when he got out of his truck. He could feel the censure in Jed’s narrow gaze. He tried to ignore it.

  “Want some help with the bulls?” he asked Jed, doing his best to sound everyday natural.

  Jed shrugged and looked away.

  But if he thought the men were hostile, their reaction was nothing compared to their wives.

  Felicity and Brenna and Noah’s wife Tess pointedly turned their backs on him when he looked their way. It was so noticeable that he could see Taggart’s bull-riding students look twice in his direction.

  He felt heat rise on his neck and turned away, pretending extreme interest in fixing a buckle on his bullfighting vest.

  The moment he did, he could feel the women’s eyes on him, and he heard the mutters and whispers as he moved away.

  A muscle ticked in his temple. Tension knotted in his neck. His fingers fumbled with the buckle. He cursed under his breath. But he told himself he didn’t care.

  They didn’t understand. If they did, they’d applaud him for his selflessness.

  But he wasn’t going to tell them. No way was he going to admit such a thing to his friends and their wives.

  It was between him and Jenny. It was nobody else’s business.

  So he kept his chin up and his gaze firm. He fixed the buckle on the vest, then went about checking the chutes and pitched in sorting the bulls the way he always did. He was cool and efficient. Steady and dependable. They didn’t need to talk to him. He didn’t need to talk to them.

  The atmosphere was different today, though. There was none of the usual camaraderie that always made him look forward to Taggart’s weekend schools. There wasn’t a hint of the habitual needling and easy teasing that he and Taggart and Jed and Noah shared.

  He stiffened his spine, assuring himself he didn’t care. He’d survive.

  He was surviving now. Surviving every day without something—without someone—that hurt a lot worse.

  It was easy enough to ignore the silence until lunchtime.

  But when he went to get a hot dog and some chili from the pot Brenna was ladling out, she was always serving somebody else. At first he thought that in the crush of hungry cowboys, she just didn’t see him standing there with an empty plate. But then the crowd thinned out, and still he stood there, and she didn’t even look at him.

  He felt the lead settle in the pit of his stomach. But he could be just as stubborn as she was. He didn’t move away.

  “I’d like a hot dog, please.” He kept his voice even, tried to make it sound casual, as if it wasn’t choking him to have to ask for something so simple.

  Brenna slapped a hot dog and a bun on his plate and never once looked his way.

  “Thanks.”

  But she had already turned away to answer something Tess was saying to her.

  At least the spoon was in the chili crock. He helped himself to that. Then he carried his plate to the table with the condiments and took his time putting mustard and catsup on the bun. No reason to hurry. No one was waiting for his company.

  Taggart, his back turned, was deep in conversation with two students. Three or four others were talking to Noah. Jed, standing a little to one side, eating, glanced Mace’s way, then moved deliberately to join Noah’s conversation.

  Jaw set, Mace carried his plate to his truck and sat on the tailgate. He took a bite of the hot dog. He hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday evening.

  “El hambre is la mejor salsa,” he remembered from high school Spanish. Hunger is the best sauce.

  The hot dog tasted like sawdust. He chewed it anyway.

  Conversations went on around him, past him, over him—never once included him. Tess and Felicity came down from the house, each carrying one of the twins. Brenna followed with Neile, her toddler. Taggart stopped his conversation to take a twin in his arms and, grinning, jiggle it up and down. Jed came across and took Neile away from her mother.

  “How’s my baby?” Jed said, and nuzzled his nose against Neile’s rose-petal cheek.

  Mace looked away.

  “I brought you some lemonade this time.” The voice at his elbow made him jerk.

  He turned to see Becky holding out a paper cup.

  A corner of his mouth lifted. At least Becky hadn’t abandoned him. He took the cup she offered and drained it in one gulp. “Thanks.”

  “Want more?”

  He glanced toward the table where the coffee urn and the lemonade cooler sat. He’d have to walk past Jed and Taggart and their wives to get to it. He’d had enough pointed snubbing for one day. He shook his head. “Naw. I’ve had enough.”

  Becky followed his gaze. “I’ll get it,” she said.

  She took the cup and marched across the yard. He watched her go, surprised at how she’d taken charge, surprised, too, at how tall she seemed. It was just yesterday she had to crane her neck to look up at him.

  “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun,” he muttered under his breath.

  She came back with two cups, handed him one, then set hers down on the tailgate and boosted herself up to sit alongside him.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come today,” she said. She was staring straight ahead, not looking at him.

  He shot a quick glance in her direction. “I always come. When have I ever missed a school?”

  “You haven’t.” She took a swallow of lemonade. “But you haven’t ever got a divorce before, either.”

  She looked up at him then, and her green eyes were dark with worry.

  Of course she knew. Why had he figured she didn’t? He turned his head to stare across the yard at the corral. He could have told her it was just a separation, but it was a step toward divorce. That was the goal. No sense in denying it. “Not the same thing. One has nothing to do with the other.”

  Becky didn’t say anything to that. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her booted feet swing back and forth.

  He could feel the questions she wasn’t asking. What does it have to do with? Why are you getting a divorce?

  But she didn’t say a word.

  He took off his hat and shoved a hand through his hair. “Look,” he said, “sometimes things happen. Things you don’t count on. Things you don’t plan. Things you don’t want! But they do and then . . . you got to deal with them.”

  Becky’s boots stopped swinging.

  “Yeah,” she said, her gaze settling on her father and stepmother and the babies they held. Then, in a voice that sounded like it had to work its way up from China, she said, “I know.”

  *

  The hundred and sixty-four days dwindled to a hundred and fifty-five, and Jenny hadn’t made any headway at all.

  How could she when every time she even caught a glimpse of her stubborn husband, he headed in the other direction?

  She was determined to do her share of the summer field work, figuring that it would bring her together with him. It didn’t. If she went to help with the irrigation, he stayed on the other side of the field. If she ventured to ride along a fence line and discovered him there, too, he said, “I’ll do this,” and waved her away.

  The one time she did actually get to exchange words with him—when the letter finally came about the land they’d been trying to buy and she went up to the cabin with it—he met her at the door and said tersely, “Obviously we won’t be buying it now.”

  She thought he looked like hell. He was thinner than she’d ever seen him. Wearier-looking. There were dark circles under his eyes. She wanted to put her arms around him and couldn’t stop herself from taking a step forward.

  He immediately stepped back behind the half-closed door, holding his hand out for the letter at the same time. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Mace, please don’t do this.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got to.”

  He’ll come to his senses, Jenny told herself. She knew he would.

  At least she prayed he would.

  In the meantime, she didn’t know wha
t else to do.

  *

  “You think I should what?” Jenny stared at Felicity, certain she had heard wrong. Of course she was preoccupied and missed half the things that were said to her these days.

  But had Felicity really suggested that she—

  “Go out on a date.”

  She had heard right. She stared at her friend. “You’re joking of course.”

  “Actually, I’m not.” Felicity grimaced as she eased a strand of hair out of a nursing Willy’s eager grasp. “Though I would have hated anyone who suggested it to me,” she admitted, forestalling Jenny’s next protest. “I did hate people who suggested it to me when I was still getting over Dirk’s death.”

  “So why are you suggesting it now?”

  “Mace isn’t dead.”

  “I know that.” But sometimes these days she wanted to kill him!

  It would be a damn sight easier than living with the pieces of her life that he had so determinedly shattered, then thrown away.

  She’d called his lawyer and tried to get him to talk some sense into Mace. But Anthony Hollis was just as pompous an ass as he’d been in high school. You couldn’t talk to him then, and Jenny couldn’t get him to listen to her now.

  “I can’t talk my client out of a separation and subsequent divorce that he deems in his best interest, Mrs. Nichols,” Anthony had said in his most patronizing voice.

  “His best interest!” Jenny had sputtered. “Do you know why he wants this divorce, Tony?”

  She’d heard Anthony’s teeth come together with a snap and she remembered he did not like to be called Tony. Tough.

  “He doesn’t need a reason beyond irreconcilable differences,” Anthony said.

  “We can reconcile them, damn it, if he’d sit down and talk to me.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to let the lawyers do the talking,” Anthony said in his stuffy voice.

  “Are you telling me to get a lawyer?”

  He was.

  And now Felicity was suggesting she get a date!

  The world was conspiring against her.

  “I think, under the circumstances, a date would be a wonderful thing,” Felicity went on doggedly. “It would take your mind off you-know-who. It would show you that there are other fish in the sea.”