The Cowboy Finds a Family

by Anne McAllister

  “I don’t care if there are other fish in the sea.”

  “And—” Felicity went on just as if Jenny hadn’t spoken “—if Mace found out, it just might wake him up.”

  “Wake him up?”

  “Make him jealous.”

  “Mace? Jealous?” Mace had never been jealous in his life!

  He’d never had reason to be. Since the day she’d laid eyes on him Jenny had never looked at another man.

  “Why not Mace?” Felicity said. “He still loves you.”

  Jenny wondered how everyone knew that.

  Most of the time when people got divorces, at least one person had fallen out of love. She pointed that out, but Felicity wasn’t convinced.

  “Not in this case,” she said.

  Why did they think she and Mace were getting a divorce then? She didn’t ask. “I don’t want to go out on a date,” she said.

  “Neither did I,” Felicity said complacently. “But I went anyway.”

  “And did you have a good time?” Jenny asked with more than the tiniest bit of sarcasm.

  “No. But I’m not sorry I went. It made me aware of how dead I felt. And later, how alive I became around Taggart.”

  “Mmm.” Trouble was Jenny already knew how alive she was—around Mace.

  “Besides,” Felicity said smugly, “I’ve got the perfect date for you.”

  Jenny groaned. “Some pie-eyed doughboy who eats garlic sandwiches?”

  “Close,” Felicity said. “My brother.”

  “What brother? I didn’t mean—” she began, embarrassed now.

  Felicity laughed. “His name is Tom. He’s a professor of colonial history at a college in Iowa.”

  “I think Iowa’s a bit far to go for a date.”

  “Ah, but he’s coming here.” Felicity shifted Willy to the other side, then smiled up at Jenny. “Tomorrow.”

  Jenny froze. She shook her head quickly. “No. I can’t.”

  “You could . . .”

  “No.” She was backing toward the door.

  “Relax,” Felicity said easily. “I won’t make you do it. I just thought . . .” she gave a faint shrug “. . . maybe it would help.”

  Jenny knew that all their friends wanted to help.

  She knew they were all poised to do anything they could. For her. For Mace. For both of them.

  If they only knew what to do.

  But there was nothing anyone could do. She smiled a little wistfully. “Thanks for the thought.”

  “Tom’s a nice guy. He’s divorced. Has a five-year-old daughter, Katie. He was going to come out for a couple of weeks and bring Katie, but his ex-wife just got remarried and so Tom is coming on his own.”

  “I see.” She wasn’t sure she saw, actually. But she didn’t see what it had to do with her, in any case. No matter how nice Felicity’s brother was, he wasn’t Mace. She wasn’t interested.

  “Think about it,” Felicity said.

  *

  Becky had been doing a lot of thinking.

  About what was going on at her house. About what was happening to Mace and Jenny.

  It felt like the world was coming apart. Like nothing was working anymore at all. She didn’t much like it—any of it—but she didn’t know how to fix it.

  She thought about discussing it with Susannah, Noah and Tess’s daughter, who’d become as good a friend to her as Tuck was since the Tanners had moved up to Montana from Wyoming. But frankly, Becky was embarrassed. She didn’t like admitting that things were less than perfect at home.

  After all the work that she and Susannah had done to get her father and Felicity together, it seemed like she’d failed if she had to admit that things weren’t super.

  They had been—until Willy and Abby.

  But there wasn’t much she could do about Willy and Abby. It wasn’t like anyone had asked her if she wanted twins! They’d simply told her.

  She could still remember how happy her dad and Felicity had looked when they’d given her the news. She knew how grouchy her dad was these days and how distracted Felicity was, and she wondered if they were still so thrilled.

  It wasn’t something she thought she could ask.

  She didn’t have anybody to ask about Mace and Jenny, either.

  It was true—about the divorce. Before she’d gone to sit by Mace on the tailgate of his truck at bull-riding school, she’d hoped Felicity was wrong, that she’d made a mistake. But one look at Mace had told her Felicity was right.

  Why? she wanted to ask him. What happened?

  But she couldn’t. When she looked at Mace that day, he’d reminded her of her dog, Digger, the day he’d been shot by that hunter.

  He’d hurt so much he even bit her dad who was trying to help him. The good news was that Digger eventually recovered.

  She wasn’t so sure about Mace.

  She would have liked to ask Susannah’s opinion about that at least, but there wasn’t time, and anyway Susannah had her own problems.

  She had to leave the Monday after bull-riding school to go to some aunt’s mother’s funeral down in Wyoming.

  And even if she’d been there, Becky wasn’t sure what she could have said. There was stuff about Mace Susannah didn’t know.

  She didn’t know about those talks Becky used to have with God, for one thing. The ones where she sort of said she wouldn’t mind having Mace for her own.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell Susannah that.

  Susannah didn’t know that Becky’s pillowcase had a lot in common with Mace, either. Susannah’s pillowcase had flowers on it and the hem wasn’t frayed.

  Becky had never told Susannah that she felt wobbly in the knees sometimes when Mace grinned at her, either. And she’d never told anyone whose lock of hair that was that she kept in the envelope in the trick box on her dresser!

  One time when she was staying at Mace and Jenny’s for the weekend, Jenny had cut Mace’s hair, and Becky had volunteered to sweep up after.

  “Your grandma trained you right.” Jenny had laughed, handing her the broom.

  Becky swept. And when she was dumping it, she just happened to hang on to one shiny black lock for her own.

  No one knew whose it was—not even her father. He thought it belonged to Digger. “What do you need the hair for when you’ve got the whole dog?” he’d asked her.

  “I like it,” Becky had answered with a shrug. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  But Susannah would know right off it wasn’t Digger’s hair. She’d want to know whose it was. And Becky had never been ready to talk about that. So she couldn’t talk to Susannah, even when she came back from Wyoming.

  Later she wondered if maybe God sent her Tuck.

  She and Tuck McCall had been friends as long as she could remember. He was a year older, but they’d played together when they were little. They rode the bus together to school, and rode horses together, and before Susannah came, Tuck had pretty much been her best friend. He had been with her watching on television when Taggart won the National Finals Rodeo. And he’d been there, stubbornly telling her that her dad wasn’t gonna die when Taggart and Noah had been hurt in an accident coming home from the finals.

  Becky was the first person he told when Brenna, his uncle Jed’s new wife, decided she was going to exhibit his sketches along with her watercolors at her New York opening. Three years earlier Becky had been the one Tuck had told when his mother, Marcy, was dying.

  “I know about dyin’,” he’d told her when Taggart had been hurt. Becky knew that was true. They had cried together at her death.

  She hadn’t spent as much time with Tuck recently. Maybe it was because she had Susannah now, or maybe it was because Tuck was older and had bigger fish to fry and more important things to do. He was, after all, an artist.

  But she was glad when Brenna called and asked Taggart if Tuck could spend the weekend with them while she and Jed went down to Jackson Hole for an opening of one of her art shows.

  Tuck had been with her
that day they’d seen Mace’s truck going to the cabin. And he’d known Mace and Jenny all his life, too. Plus he was pretty smart. He didn’t talk much, but he saw a lot.

  He’d probably know if it was her fault that they were getting a divorce—if she could figure out how to ask him.

  It turned out to be easier than she thought.

  Saturday afternoon they were sitting by the creek, skipping rocks, counting how many splashes they could make.

  Tuck was usually better at it than she was, but she’d done a lot of practicing lately. The creek was one of the places she could go where she couldn’t hear crying babies.

  She asked him where Neile was, because she was actually sort of surprised that her parents didn’t have Neile, too—though how they could possibly have managed a third baby she didn’t know!

  “Jenny’s got her,” Tuck replied absently. He was searching out rocks and piling them up in front of him.

  The rock Becky had been about to skip dropped from her fingers. “Jenny?”

  “Yeah. Brenna reckoned it’d give her something else to think about.”

  “Other than . . . the divorce, you mean?” Becky said carefully.

  Tuck picked a blade of grass and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Yep.”

  Becky wrapped her arms around her knees. “Do you know why?” she asked cautiously. “Why they’re getting the divorce, that is?”

  “Nope.” He studied the rocks he had collected, then looked over at Becky’s to see if any of hers looked more promising.

  “No idea?” Becky pressed.

  Tuck frowned. “Why? What difference does it make?”

  Becky shrugged. “I was just . . . wondering. My dad always said they were meant for each other. Always had been. So I was sorta surprised.”

  Tuck slanted her a glance. “I’d’ve thought you’d be all for it.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He grinned. “You were always followin’ Mace around.”

  Becky felt her face burn. She picked up a rock and flung it hard. “I didn’t follow Mace around.”

  Tuck’s brows lifted. He looked at her for a long moment, unblinking, until she was the one who looked away.

  “Much,” Becky muttered, head down.

  Tuck grunted. He looked over at her rocks again, hopefully this time.

  She sighed. “Go ahead.”

  He selected one and taking careful aim, he sidearmed it across the water. They both watched it skip, skip, skip, skip, then sink.

  Then they sat silently.

  “You don’t think I caused it, do you?” she asked finally.

  Tuck cocked his head, his hazel eyes meeting hers. “Them gettin’ a divorce?”

  Becky nodded gravely, then drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “I sorta used to ask God for, um, Mace.”

  She heard Tuck suck in his breath.

  “I was little,” she said quickly. “I didn’t know any better. But I wondered. What if—”

  “Naw.”

  “Naw?” she said hopefully.

  “Naw,” Tuck repeated firmly. “God don’t work like that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause I used to pray sometimes that Brian Lindstrom would break his arm.”

  Becky’s eyes widened. She thought Brian had been Tuck’s friend. “You did? Why?”

  Tuck tossed her a scornful look. “So’s I could be the best pitcher. Why d’you think?”

  “Ah.” She nodded, understanding. Besides his drawing, Tuck liked baseball best.

  “It never happened, you notice,” Tuck said gruffly.

  “No.” She paused. “He’s pretty good.”

  Tuck snorted. “Just gets better ’n’ better.”

  “Yeah.” She tried not to sound too admiring for fear Tuck would think she didn’t respect his pitching. “So, prayin’ for bad stuff to happen to other people doesn’t work? Ever?” Becky pressed, just to be sure.

  “Nope. Jed says God don’t play favorites.”

  Becky loosed her knees and took a deep breath. She stretched out her legs and tipped her head back and looked up at the deep blue Montana sky. Something that had been tight and knotted inside her eased a little. She took another breath and felt it shudder out of her.

  “You gonna use all those rocks?” Tuck asked.

  She smiled. “You go ahead.”

  *

  Jenny should have said no.

  She should have said she was busy, that her life was too full, too complicated, too . . . too anything.

  She should never have said she would take Jed and Brenna’s baby!

  “For the weekend,” Brenna said apologetically. “We want to go to Jackson. Just the two of us.” She blushed a little, then hurried on. “We could take the kids, but . . .”

  But they didn’t want to. They wanted each other. Jenny had no trouble seeing that. She understood it, too, all too well.

  “And we thought maybe you’d like . . . I mean, I suppose you might not . . . but if you’re not too busy . . .”

  And Jenny couldn’t lie and say she was.

  Everyone knew she wasn’t busy now that school was out. She was going crazy on her own.

  They felt sorry for her. They wanted to distract her. Make her look outside herself, take an interest in life. And they knew she loved kids.

  She was a natural.

  They didn’t know why Mace had left.

  She didn’t tell them. She just said, “Yes.”

  And so she had Neile.

  She’d never had a baby before. Had wished. Had dreamed. But never . . .

  She and Mace had taken care of Becky occasionally, before Taggart remarried. They invited her out to spend the occasional weekend with them, realizing that Taggart needed a break and that his parents couldn’t be counted on to do it all. Plus, they genuinely liked having her around.

  Jenny thought the little girl could use a mother’s touch now and then. A steady diet of rodeo cowboys could leave a girl a little unbalanced.

  So she and Becky baked cookies. They did jigsaw puzzles. They planted a garden and picked wildflowers. Becky lapped it up, enjoying every moment Jenny spent with her.

  But Jenny had never kidded herself: the person Becky adored was Mace.

  “You’re her hero,” Jenny had said to her husband more than once after one of Becky’s weekends with them. “If she was a little older, I’d have some real competition.”

  Mace had grinned the “aw shucks” grin that had melted Jenny’s knees back in junior high, the grin she was equally sure was melting Becky’s.

  “You think so?” he said, as pleased as he was embarrassed.

  Becky, of course, never said so. For a little kid, she had admirable restraint, Jenny thought. She just followed Mace wherever he went.

  Jenny didn’t mind. It showed that the little girl had good taste.

  Besides, she’d always told herself, it was good for Mace. It gave him experience with kids. Experience they’d need when they had their own.

  At least that was what she’d hoped.

  The feelings were bittersweet when Brenna and Jed brought Neile Friday afternoon.

  “She’s so big!” Jenny said in surprise. She knew Neile was over a year now, but she hadn’t seen her in a month and the change was noticeable.

  “She’s walking,” Brenna said. “So watch out! I hate to impose on you like this. But I couldn’t ask Taggart and Felicity. They’ve got their hands full. And they’re keeping Tuck. Tess really doesn’t have time with her brood. So I thought, you know . . .”

  Jenny smiled gamely and took Neile out of her mother’s arms, snuggling the little girl against her shoulder to wave good-bye.

  Fortunately it wasn’t until they had disappeared around the bend that she felt the first renegade tear fall. It wasn’t Neile, missing her parents, who was crying.

  Jenny wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sniffled. “Sorry about that,” she said to the little girl as briskly as she could
. Her voice only broke a little. Neile looked at her curiously, her lower lip trembled.

  “Oh now,” Jenny whispered. “Don’t you cry, too.” She took a deep breath. “Come on, young lady. I’ll show you around.”

  Jed had set up a portable crib in Butch and Sundance’s room before he and Brenna had left. Now Jenny carried Neile into the room, aware that she’d almost never set foot in here since Mace had left. It was stupid, she knew, to avoid it. But she couldn’t help it. She tried to sound cheery now.

  “This is where you’re going to sleep,” she told Neile, “in that snug little bed your daddy brought. And I’ll be right next door.”

  She carried the little girl out of one room and into the other. “See? Not far at all. And if you want anything, all you have to do is yell.” She dropped a kiss on the baby’s fair hair. “Which I’m sure you will.”

  At least the lip had retracted. Now Neile gummed her fist and looked up curiously into Jenny’s eyes as if to say, “Who are you and why are you talking a thousand words a minute?”

  “It’s just that I’m nervous,” Jenny explained.

  Being the sole person responsible for a child who couldn’t even say, “I’m hungry” or “I need to go to the bathroom,” was a daunting prospect.

  Neile screwed up her face and started to whimper.

  “Shh, now. Shh. It’s all right.” Jenny hoped, even as she said the words, that they weren’t a lie. After all her desperation for a family, what if she wasn’t cut out for motherhood?

  What if she had put Mace through all that for nothing? Had she destroyed her marriage over a desire to be something for which she had no talent?

  She hadn’t destroyed their marriage, she reminded herself. It was Mace who had walked out.

  She could have learned to live without having children.

  But she did love the warm weight of Jed and Brenna’s little girl snug against her chest. She did relish the fresh laundry smell and soft rosy cheeks of little Neile McCall.

  And she knew Mace would have, too.

  “Oh, Mace.” She buried the words in Neile’s silky hair. Then, because the little girl whimpered, Jenny did a desperate little two-step into the hallway, dancing the baby in a circle, humming softly.

  “Shh, Neile. Shh, little baby.” She nuzzled the baby’s soft hair, nibbled the side of her neck, then blew lightly against her cheek.