Dry Creek Daddy

by Janet Tronstad

  Hannah turned to Mark. “Let’s go. He can stay here for all I care.”

  Her father’s attitude reminded her of why she’d felt she needed to sneak away from his house. No one at the home for unwed mothers was even pretending to be part of her family. And that meant they didn’t feel they had the right to condemn her, either.

  She started walking to the door when she heard Mark speak.

  “I’ll run the combine,” he announced quietly.

  Hannah went back into the room.

  “You?” her father sounded even more agitated as he stared at Mark. “Why, I can’t let a Nelson—”

  Hannah stared at the man who had been the only father she’d ever known. She wasn’t the only one he disliked. He wouldn’t ask for help from anyone. He’d locked eyes with Mark and was starting to sit up as though that would prove something.

  “You need to get that wheat in a granary soon or you won’t have a crop at all,” Mark said, his voice not rising. “You should have let me help you last week when I offered.”

  “You already said you’d help him?” Hannah squeaked, staring at Mark. She could not believe this.

  He nodded. “And got cussed out for the effort.”

  Hannah glanced over to her father and saw him looking sheepish.

  “You refused to let him help you?” she asked. “Why?”

  Her father might not ask for assistance, but she hadn’t expected he would turn it down.

  “I don’t need him to do anything.” Then, looking belligerent, her father added, “And don’t think I’m going to pay overtime for any twelve-hour days.”

  “It’ll be more like sixteen-hour days since you let it go so late, and I’ll not be charging you a penny, you old fool,” Mark said. “You treat Hannah better and don’t say a bad word about Jeremy and we’ll consider ourselves even.”

  Hannah smiled slightly. Her father glowered at everyone, but he kept his mouth shut. He was apparently willing to accept help when it was free.

  “You’ll keep him quiet and resting?” the nurse asked Hannah. “For at least a full day?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll get the doctor, then,” the nurse said. “It’ll take a few minutes to get him ready to leave.”

  “My pickup is busted up, too,” her father mumbled as the nurse left the room.

  “I’ve got mine outside,” Mark said. “Do we need to call a tow truck for yours?”

  Hannah’s father shook his head. “The repair shop has it. I’ll come back and get it next week. In the meantime, we need to take this back with us.”

  He pointed to a small cardboard box with a stock number on top of it that was lying at the foot of his bed. “For the combine.”

  Mark nodded. “That’s the part you need?”

  “Yes,” the older man said. “I made the ambulance guys get it for me before I agreed to go with them.”

  Mark bent over and picked up the box.

  “You were right, then,” Hannah said to Mark as they exited the room. Together they walked back down the hall. The nurse was planning to bring Hannah’s father to the left entrance when he was ready.

  “I’m sorry he’s so rude,” Hannah said. “Hopefully he’ll only need you for a day or two.”

  Mark looked over. “You’re not responsible for your father.”

  “Maybe not,” Hannah said. “But someone needs to apologize for him. He’s gotten worse. I had no idea.”

  “He misses you,” Mark said.

  “I doubt that,” Hannah muttered.

  She reminded herself that she needed to stay in Dry Creek for only a few months. By then—please, God, she mouthed—Jeremy would be well again, at least if the doctor had an opening and could perform that new stem cell treatment she’d heard about. He’d already done it for others and had wonderful results.

  “I’ll pray with you, if you tell me what’s troubling you,” Mark said.

  “Oh.” Hannah hadn’t realized he was listening that closely. Her words had been little more than two short whispered breaths. She didn’t want to confess to her troubles, though. Not until she knew if she could trust him.

  Finally Hannah nodded. “I didn’t know you pray.”

  They had both been in Mrs. Hargrove’s Sunday school class for years, so they knew their Bible stories. But by high school, neither one of them was taking God very seriously.

  “You certainly didn’t pray back then,” she added.

  Mark shrugged. “Things change.”

  She had no answer to that; it was obvious.

  “We’ll be back at your dad’s place soon,” Mark finally added.

  “He won’t sit quiet,” Hannah warned. “You’ll wonder why you ever agreed to help him.”

  “I’m not helping him,” Mark said as he looked over at her. “I’m doing it for you and Jeremy.”

  Hannah felt the panic inside. “I don’t need any charity.”

  Mark grunted. “Never said you did.”

  Hannah almost shook herself. Part of keeping her guard up was to do it so quietly that no one noticed. Mark would be watching her if he thought she was trying to avoid reasonable help.

  “I can ask for assistance if I need it,” she assured him.

  “Of course.” Mark smiled as he reached for the door.

  Hannah let him open it and didn’t say anything. This whole exchange was making her wonder if she could bring herself to ask for help in a crisis. She never would ask for herself, but she would have to ask for Jeremy if he was as sick as he might be. She’d know more after the upcoming doctor’s appointment. For now, she had no choice but to accept Mark’s help, even if it meant she put her heart at risk. She didn’t know how she was going to cope with seeing him every day until her father’s wheat was harvested.

  Chapter Two

  Mark wished he hadn’t bought the bags of feed that now filled the back seat of his pickup. He could barely smell the fading rose that had been lying on the seat of his pickup. The poor flower had no water tube. He felt a little foolish having it there now that Mr. Stelling was claiming that he needed to ride in the middle of the seat. It was difficult to be gallant and give a rose to a woman when the woman’s father was seated between them. Mr. Stelling had his knee braced against the gear shift and Hannah was huddled in the opposite side of the cab looking like she was weighed down by the troubles of the whole world—not that she would admit it.

  Mark figured he’d made a little progress with her, but it wasn’t enough. It had been so easy to be her hero when they were younger. Now she wouldn’t even talk to him.

  “You’ll need to get these shocks checked,” Mr. Stelling complained as he pressed his knuckles down on the seat’s padding. “Not very comfortable.”

  Mark put his vehicle into Reverse. He turned to give Hannah a quick smile but saw she wasn’t looking his way.

  “Dad,” Hannah protested, still looking out the windshield.

  “Well, there’s too much bouncing on the passenger side,” her father said as he turned to face her. “A man needs to take good care of his pickup. Mark should know that.”

  Hannah turned to look at her father. “It doesn’t matter. He’s doing us a favor.”

  Mr. Stelling turned back to stare out the front window.

  In all that time, Hannah hadn’t spared Mark a glance.

  “Your father just likes to keep me away from you,” Mark said, hoping he’d get a chuckle from at least one of them.

  Hannah didn’t turn his way and Mr. Stelling didn’t answer. The other man had a white bandage wrapped around his head, and he was sitting straight in the seat just like the nurse had asked him to.

  “Not that I blame him for that,” Mark added.

  That didn’t gain him any further response, so Mark kept silent as he made the turn from the parking lot to the main street l
eading to the freeway.

  “I don’t like hospitals,” Mr. Stelling finally said. “They make me cranky.”

  Mark figured that was as close to an apology as he’d get from the older man.

  “None of us like them,” Mark agreed. They were crowded together in the cab, but at least now it didn’t feel quite as awkward.

  Within a few minutes, they were on the freeway and headed back to Dry Creek. There was little traffic. Large empty fields lined both sides of the freeway. Mark refrained from mentioning that all those other ranchers had managed to get their wheat harvested. A herd of deer stood in the distance, grazing. The clouds on the horizon looked darker than they had been. Mark only hoped the rain would hold off long enough to get Mr. Stelling’s harvest done.

  “I shouldn’t have made that remark about your head being damaged,” Mr. Stelling offered when they’d driven a few miles. He was silent for a while and then asked, “Did it hurt much all those years you were out of it?”

  “You mean during the coma?” Mark turned slightly. It was not surprising the older man would ask about that time. Everyone seemed curious. “No, it didn’t hurt. At least, I don’t think so. I don’t remember much.”

  Mr. Stelling nodded. “My wife, she was in a coma a few days before she died.”

  “Ah.” Mark understood now. He’d forgotten that fact. “Don’t worry. She wasn’t in any pain.”

  A few more miles passed. Mark wondered if he’d always be known as the man who’d been in a coma. People used to say he’d do great things in his life—that he’d be a hero. No one said that any longer. He even had some sensational grocery store newspaper call and offer him a “significant amount of money” to interview him for a story. The thought made him cringe. He didn’t want to be known as the man who had been stuck in a coma for four years. A man needed some dignity.

  Mark thought a moment. “I still don’t remember everything about that night when I got shot.”

  Mark didn’t want his life laid out to satisfy the curiosity of strangers, but he did want to tell Hannah how sorry he was about what happened back then, and this might be his only chance to do so.

  “I’d called and asked you to come over and talk to me,” Hannah said. Her voice was low, but she had turned so he could see her. He wasn’t sure of her emotions from her eyes, but he thought he saw some hurt in their depths. He wanted to soothe it away.

  “I remember that clearly,” Mark said. “Your dad was at some church meeting, but I still parked my pickup out by the driveway into the ranch and you walked out to meet me. Some of your mother’s flowers were blooming.”

  “The wild roses.” Hannah smiled then. “You could smell them all along the fence. It was a moonlit night.”

  “They were a deep pink,” Mark offered. “Beautiful.”

  Mr. Stelling grunted. “I would have grounded her for a month if I’d known she was seeing you behind my back. You never were any good for her.”

  “He was my friend,” Hannah protested even though she didn’t look over at him. “There was a bully at school and he always protected me.”

  “I still am your friend,” Mark said. “I hope you know that even though there probably aren’t any bullies now.”

  Except for your father, Mark added to himself silently. He figured Hannah wouldn’t want him to say that, though. She didn’t answer, and memories flooded Mark. He’d thought she had circles under her red-rimmed eyes that night because she was coming down with a cold. He hadn’t realized until later that she had been scared and had likely been crying.

  “I should have told you straight out that I was pregnant,” Hannah said quietly. She did glance up at him then. “Instead, all I could do was pick a fight. I wanted to argue. I thought there would be time to tell you about the baby when you came back.”

  Mark shook his head. “It was my fault.”

  Her father grunted this time. “I’ll say.”

  “Do you mind?” Mark asked the man. “We’re trying to have a conversation here.”

  “You can’t order people around,” Mr. Stelling said. Then he crossed his arms over his stomach. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

  “I don’t know any longer,” Mark snapped back without thinking. On the day he and Hannah were trying to discuss, he’d known exactly who he was. He’d just been awarded a full scholarship to the college in Missoula. Everyone said he’d win at least two events in the local teen rodeo like he had for the past three years. He craved prizes like that. Somehow it was proof that he was somebody—a hero of sorts. He didn’t think he’d see any more of those wins again in life. No one gave out brass-plated belt buckles to someone for learning to tie their shoes.

  He glanced over at Hannah. He had defended her from everything once. Now he wasn’t sure if he could protect her from anything.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. The least he could do was get on that combine and harvest her father’s wheat. He didn’t want her to have to do that. She looked tired to him.

  “That night was my fault,” Hannah said again, her voice firm. “I shouldn’t have gone on like I did. You were excited about that scholarship and all I could see was that it was pulling you away from me.”

  “No,” Mark protested. There was that flash of hurt in her eyes again. “I always saw that scholarship as being for us. For a chance to live a good life for us—you, me and—well, I wasn’t thinking of children then, but it would have been all of us.”

  He’d never thought he’d be content to be a rancher. He had wanted to win all the prizes the world had. He pictured Hannah on his arm, looking proud. A big house. An important job. Lots of money. Truthfully, he didn’t ever remember asking himself if that was the kind of life that Hannah would want, though.

  “Well, if I hadn’t been so upset, you wouldn’t have gone off like you did,” she insisted. “I knew that scholarship was important to you.”

  Mark shook his head. He wasn’t willing to let himself off the hook that easily. “It wasn’t about the scholarship. No one forced me to go out drinking with Clay. He didn’t even want to go driving around. Besides, my mother had always told me never to start drinking. She knew my father had a terrible time with it and she worried I’d inherit that from him.”

  No one needed to say anything more. Mark had let alcohol overtake him that night. He became so confused he came up with the crazy idea of taking the hunting rifle from the rack in his pickup and going in to rob that gas station. He couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking. But he still clearly saw the slice of time when he’d turned that gun on the male clerk inside the station and demanded money. Events had happened fast then. The clerk turned out to be an ex-marine and skilled enough in combat to disarm Mark. In the scuffle, the gun had discharged and the bullet slammed into Mark’s head.

  He sat there a minute, just driving as he watched the farmland go by. He was more content than he thought he’d be with his future on the family ranch. He turned toward Hannah. “Don’t let Jeremy ever drink.”

  Until this moment, Mark hadn’t realized that the Nelson curse of alcoholism could touch his precious son.

  Hannah grinned and glanced at him over her father’s head. “So far Jeremy hasn’t asked for anything stronger than grape juice. That’s his favorite. He tends to spill so he takes it in a sippy cup, but he’s almost ready for a regular big boy cup.”

  Mark basked in the moment. This was the kind of conversation parents would have.

  “The boy should be drinking milk, not juice,” Mr. Stelling announced.

  Mark saw Hannah bite back a response. He was glad they were making the turn off the gravel road. There was a lot of irritation in his pickup and only some of it belonged to him. Still, he was pleased to be escorting Hannah home.

  * * *

  Hannah felt her stomach muscles clench as the pickup turned into the drive leading to her father’s house. The sky had gro
wn lighter although it remained gray. The conversation had bumped along all the way back from Miles City, and she saw the scowl on her father’s face deepen as he looked at his place. She figured he regretted the deal with Mark. But it was too late; Mark was already parking the pickup, and someone needed to run the combine.

  “At least the rain is holding off,” she said, hoping to ease the tension. Every rancher she knew liked to talk about the weather. The clouds were gray, but there had been no droplets on the windshield of the pickup.

  Both men just grunted in response to her observation.

  Mark opened the door on his side of the cab and she did the same. She was relieved to step down onto the hard-packed ground. Maybe things would be friendlier now that they were home.

  She startled herself by even thinking of this place as home. But she took a good look around. It had been twilight when she arrived at her father’s ranch last night and dark when she left this morning. Now, seeing the place in full light, she noticed signs of neglect. Weeds had long ago overtaken her mother’s old garden space. The buildings needed new paint. Every fall her father had hired a local man to grade the road from the house to the barn, but it hadn’t been done in what looked like years.

  She heard her father slide across the seat and step down from the pickup.

  In spite of everything, she had some warm memories of living here. She hoped she would be able to do a few things to fix it up in the time she’d have.

  “It’s good to be home,” she said softly.

  Her father gave her a long look. Then he nodded curtly and started walking toward the house.

  Hannah watched him make his way to the porch. She wondered if she could ever make her peace with this man. She’d heard sermons about forgiveness and figured her adoptive father was high on the list of people she needed to work on in that area.

  She’d need God’s grace to do anything like that, she thought to herself as she followed her father over to the house.

  She walked up the steps behind the older man. Mark was right behind her.

  Her father paused as he stood in front of the door to the house.