“Jesus, I don’t believe this. What’s wrong with you people?” Christina asked. To Elizabeth she said, “Stephanie knew exactly how to work you, and you let her get away with it. I’ll bet the first thing she did when she got off the phone was high-five her friends.”
“She’s not like that,” Elizabeth said, seething at the criticism.
“Oh, please. I know the routine. I’ve seen it pulled a hundred times. Hell, if I could have gotten away with it, I would have been one of the people making one of those phone calls home.”
“So what do you think Elizabeth should have done?” Rachel asked, challenging her.
“Told her no and meant it. And she should have started a long time ago. I’m the last one to give my mother credit for anything, but that’s one thing she got right.”
Elizabeth begrudgingly agreed with her. Christina spoke to a fear that had been developing in Elizabeth for a long time. When did love become indulgence? At what point did the pleasure she derived from doing for her children become destructive to their ability to do for themselves? “It’s too late now,” Elizabeth said.
Christina reached for a cookie. “Have you told her about Jessie’s money?”
Elizabeth shook her head. At least that she’d gotten right, and without Sam having to reason her through it.
“Good luck when you do,” Christina said.
“I hated college,” Rachel said, putting a new twist on the conversation. “I couldn’t wait to get out. I don’t know if I would have made it through if Jeff hadn’t been there to push me.”
“I was just the opposite,” Ginger countered. “Loved every minute of every class.” She waved off the plate of cookies Christina now offered to everyone. “I could have made it through in five years, but I managed to stretch it to six, much to my father’s annoyance.” She thought about what she’d said. “My other father. The one who paid the bills.”
“I couldn’t wait to get there and couldn’t wait to get out,” Christina said.
“Wanted to get started on your career?” Elizabeth asked. There it was. She’d sunk to Christina’s level. So much for taking the high road.
“Oh, good one, Betty,” Christina fired back.
“Now what?” Ginger said.
“She knows I’m working at a bottom-feeding job while I’m waiting for Daddy’s ship to dock.”
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Elizabeth said. Well, not exactly. At least not that she wanted to admit to.
Ginger looked from Christina to Elizabeth and then back again. “What kind of job are you looking for?”
“I’m a filmmaker,” she said.
Elizabeth felt an abrupt, surprising softening toward Christina at the defensive, vulnerable admission. It wasn’t like her to step on other people’s dreams, even people she didn’t like. “Too bad Ginger’s mother isn’t still around. From what I’ve read, it isn’t what you know but who you know in the movie business.”
“Ten million dollars is all the introduction I’m going to need.”
“We probably should get back to the tape,” Rachel said. “Elizabeth has a long drive home.”
“You know, you could stay here next time if you didn’t want to make the trip in one day.” Christina seemed as surprised at the blurted invitation as Elizabeth. “It’s still Jessie’s house, at least it still belongs to the estate. He was your father as much as he was mine, and I’m sure Rhona wouldn’t mind.”
To dismiss the invitation out of hand would diminish the effort it had taken to make it. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
Rachel put the tape in and hit play.
Jessie’s Story
I left the Farnsworth ranch with the lease in my pocket and stars in my eyes. I was in love. It wasn’t what I’d felt for Wynona, but something that was pure and complete and let me know love was more than sex, it was a house and kids and coming home every night to sit by the fire and talk about the things that had happened that day.
With marriage in mind and the leases locked up, I started working on the pipe companies, offering them the same deal I had the ranchers and first dibs on the money when the oil started flowing. I couldn’t get workers to give up paying jobs for a lick and a promise, but a number of them were willing to give me nights and Sundays.
I rolled along thinking I was the biggest bull in the barnyard when what I was up to got back to some powerful people who didn’t care for the idea that a hayseed like me had bested them. They tried talking the ranchers into canceling their leases, but west Texas produced men with stubborn streaks wider than the Rio Grande. What they were slow to give they refused to take back.
With the ranchers holding firm, they came after my workers, beating a couple of them senseless just to show they could, and that they could get away with it. The threats worked on about half of the men, but the rest, the really tough ones, got together and decided they would give up their paying jobs to sign on as part owners the way the ranchers had. They moved into the field, living together for safety, working every hour they weren’t eating or sleeping. The pipe went down twice as fast as it had before. We were a month ahead of where I figured we’d be come September—halfway to the New Mexico border, where the new refinery was even further along—when the pipe shipments stopped.
I tried begging and bribing, but whoever got there before me knew the magic words and there was nothing I could say that mattered. I was watching the last of the pipe being laid and feeling as close to giving up as I’d ever been before or since when I looked up and saw a streak of dust coming at me across the horizon. In the thirty minutes it took Wyatt Farnsworth to reach me I’d imagined myself doing battle with the half-dozen thugs I was sure were on their way to fit me for a pine box.
The first thing Wyatt did when he eased himself out of the truck was check his mustache to make sure the curl hadn’t come undone in the heat and wind. He ambled over to where I was standing, touching the brim of his dust-laden Stetson and nodding his head in greeting. “Hear you been havin’ some trouble getting across my land. Cattle don’t much care for you boys hanging round.”
“Can’t lay pipe I don’t have.”
“Yeah, heard about that, too.” He reached into his back pocket and handed me an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“Another five percent of the business added to what I have coming if you take it. Think it over and let me know.” With that, he turned and headed back the way he’d come, leaving me holding a blank check and the directions to a pipe manufacturing plant in Mexico.
Another five percent left me less than twenty. But twenty of something was a hell of a lot better than twenty-five of nothing. And there was an upside that I’m sure Farnsworth hadn’t figured when he’d made his offer. With him as the second biggest shareholder, I found it necessary and convenient to ride out his way for a little jawing whenever I felt the need to cast eyes on his daughter.
Either he wasn’t as smart as I’d given him credit for or I was better at hiding my feelings than I thought, because it took him almost six months to warn me off Denise. Turned out she wasn’t the fifteen or sixteen I’d guessed but thirteen. That should have dumped water on the fire I had going for her, but I was too far gone for anything like that to get in the way. Her being thirteen gave me time to get the business going without worrying she’d get tired of waiting or that someone else would come along.
It took another year before the first shipment of oil left the fields of west Texas in the Reed and Company Pipeline and landed at the refinery in New Mexico, and another year and a half after that before I had enough money put aside to go out to California to find my folks and keep my promise.
It wasn’t a big secret that I planned to ask Denise to marry me when I got back. I’d been heading that direction for almost three years and had become such a regular at the farmhouse that Denise’s mother moved another chair into the dining room and left it there.
When it came time to leave, Wyatt drove me to the train st
ation up in Lubbock, surprising both me and Denise when he let her come along to tell me good-bye. With twenty minutes before my train left, figuring it wasn’t near enough time to get into any real trouble, Wyatt left us alone to find himself a box of Cuban cigars.
I decided then was the time to give Denise the locket I’d bought for her birthday. She cried when I put it on. I puffed up more than I had a right, thinking it meant more than it did. I caught people looking at us as they passed, the women with curiosity, the men with envy. She must have seen it, too, because she did something she’d never done before. Right there in front of all those strangers she held on to the front of my jacket, came up on her toes, and kissed me. It wasn’t full on the lips—she’d closed her eyes and missed hitting me square by half my mouth. But it didn’t matter. I was seeing stars and my heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to break one of my ribs.
“How was that?” she asked.
“Fine,” I mumbled, not knowing if I should kiss her back right there or haul her someplace more private and do it right.
“Just fine?”
“It was wonderful, Denise. The best.”
She smiled. “Want me to do it again?”
“More than anything.”
She looked around. “Right here? Right now?”
I took her arm and led her to a doorway where I figured Wyatt wouldn’t see us. “I dream about kissing you all the time.”
“You do?” She asked in such a way that I knew it excited her to have that kind of power. “Want me to do it again now?”
I didn’t wait for her. I put everything I was feeling into the kiss I gave her, hitting her square on the mouth. I didn’t realize until I let her go what a huge mistake I’d made. I’d scared her. Her eyes opened wide, the white showing all the way around the blue. She started crying, this time for real.
It was a lesson I never forgot.
Chapter Thirty-three
Rachel
Rachel slid the frozen lasagna into the oven. She was making an actual sit-down meal for the kids tonight, one that included green beans, fruit salad, and John’s favorite—garlic bread covered in Parmesan cheese. For fun she’d picked up a CD of an Italian opera she’d found in the discount bin at the store where she’d gone to buy candles.
This was going to work. It was time to make the kids realize that being with her on the weekends wasn’t a temporary thing but the way it was going to be from now on. And the three of them weren’t just going to make the best of it, they were going to thrive.
She’d been moving toward this decision for the past two weeks, ever since listening to the first two tapes. Hearing Jessie talk about his life, how he’d pulled as much energy from his defeats as his victories, made her realize she’d been spending her days with Cassidy and John as if there were a bank where she could withdraw more. This time with them was too valuable to spend casually.
The doorbell rang. They were early. She smiled in anticipation. Not for an instant did she doubt that she would open the door to find Cassidy and John standing there. No one else, well, no one except Ginger, had visited her apartment.
But it was Jeff, and he was alone, a bouquet of daisies in one hand, a drugstore box of chocolates in the other. He’d lost weight since their separation and looked as cut and fit as he had in his twenties. His hair was a week or two past needing a trim and long in back the way she liked it. Dressed in jeans and a white polo shirt that hugged his chest and arms as if it had been tailored, he looked disarmingly sexy. She leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms. “Where are the kids?”
“Home. With a babysitter.”
“Why?”
“We’ve tried picking up the pieces and going on, and it’s not working. I figured it was time we tried starting over.” He handed her the flowers. “This was all I could afford the first time I took you out. They’re still my favorite.”
“Then why do you always buy me orchids?” He sent her flowers for everything, once just to celebrate Tuesday, a day of the week he insisted was normally neglected. She’d come to expect his little surprises and then, sadly, to take them for granted.
He shrugged. “Our lives changed. I thought you weren’t a daisy kind of girl anymore. My mistake, not yours.”
He’d been withdrawn since the night they made love, dropping the kids off and picking them up with a minimum of communication, letting her believe he’d finally given up on them. She’d gained an odd kind of strength in his aloofness and was afraid of being pulled back again. “I remember that night,” she said softly. She took the flowers from his outstretched hand and held them to her chest. “You sold your autographed copy of the Doors’ Waiting for the Sun album to get the money to take me out.”
“The best investment I ever made.” He held out the candy and grinned. “Sorry—I couldn’t remember what kind I bought back then. I just remember it was cheap, and this was the cheapest I could find.”
“It was chocolate-covered cherries. Pretty provocative for a first date. My roommates thought it was hysterical.”
“You never told me.”
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
The statement hung between them like a broken promise. “Can I come in?” When she hesitated he added, “While you get ready.”
“For what?”
“Our date.”
She glanced at her silk shell and linen slacks. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” She hadn’t meant it to sound like an acceptance, but did nothing to correct the impression.
“You’re overdressed. This is a jeans and T-shirt kind of date.”
She could still say no, could still save herself from getting back on the roller coaster. “I don’t know if this is a good idea, Jeff. We’re getting along better than we have in months the way things are. The kids are—”
“This isn’t about the kids. It’s about you and me. I don’t want to look back ten years from now and wonder if we should have tried harder. I want to know we did everything we could before we gave up.”
“And what about what I want?”
He took a deep breath. “You can’t have what you really want, Rachel. I can’t make what I did go away. Nothing can. Whether it’s with or without me, for your own sanity, you’ve got to find a way to get past it.”
“I can’t. I’ve tried.”
“That’s bullshit. You’re the strongest woman I know. Look at what you went through growing up. Look who you had as a role model for a mother and then look at the incredible mother you became. Look at where you are at work, the promotions you’ve earned, the money you make. How many women coming from your background could have pulled off any of that?”
She smiled despite herself. “You get so passionate when you’re in your cheerleading mode.”
“Well? Are we on for tonight?”
Why was she fighting something she wanted? “Give me a couple of minutes.” She started to leave, then turned back. “You might as well come in—and make yourself useful. I put a lasagna in the oven that will need something done with it.”
He moved past her, lightly tossing the candy on the table by the front door. She caught a whiff of something that tweaked a memory but that she couldn’t identify. “What is that you’re wearing?”
“Old Spice.”
She laughed. “I didn’t know they made that anymore. You really did go all out.”
“Wait till you see where I’m taking you for dinner.”
The neon light over the converted boxcar said Tiny’s Elegant urger ar. When Rachel hesitated going in, Jeff assured her he’d eaten there twice in the past couple of weeks and had survived unscathed both times. After surreptitiously checking out the food on the tables they passed on their way to the counter, Rachel gamely ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a root beer milk shake. To her embarrassment, she finished it all.
“You realize what this indulgence in gluttony means, don’t you?” She tilted her glass to gather the last drops of milk shake. “I’m go
ing to be eating salads for a week.”
“Ah, but was it worth it?”
“Ask me next Wednesday.”
Jeff reached across the table to wipe a trace of salt from the corner of her mouth. “Hey,” she protested. “I was saving that.”
He caught her hand in his and twined their fingers together. “When did we get caught up in believing money mattered more than time?”
“Somewhere between not having any and thinking we were immune to its effects?” Because she liked having her hand in his, liked pretending it belonged there, she untangled her fingers from his and put her hand on her lap, out of his reach. “I don’t know. It just kind of happened.”
He pretended not to notice her withdrawal. “Ready?”
“Date’s over?” She didn’t care that she was giving him mixed signals. She wasn’t ready to go home.
“Not yet.”
They drove with the windows down, the remnants of the ninety-degree day rushing into the car with sensuous summer abandon. It was an evening of untucked shirts and unbuttoned collars, of deep, contented sighs and hair lifted languidly off the neck.
Jeff wandered through the Oakland hills, finally stopping at a wide spot in the road with a turnout that looked across the bay to San Francisco. The sun was still a half-hour from setting, the sky an explosion of pink and orange, the lights on the Bay Bridge and in the city dim promises of the spectacular land-bound milky way they would become in an hour.
“It seems I never stop to just look at anything anymore,” Rachel said, transfixed by the beauty of something she saw every day but failed to notice.
The Year that Everything Changed Page 21
