McKettricks of Texas: Garrett

by Linda Lael Miller

  “All right,” Gordon said. “When would be a good time?”

  “Later—I’ll call you later. Sometime—”

  Gordon clicked off, after making a disgruntled man-sound in her ear.

  Julie felt a little jolt when she turned her head and saw Austin standing beside her car, instead of Garrett. It was both a disappointment, she decided fitfully, and a relief.

  She rolled the window down.

  Austin bent, grinning at her. “You having car trouble or something?” he asked.

  “No,” Julie said, embarrassed. “I was just—talking on my cell phone and—”

  The man’s smile was wickedly boyish, Julie thought, detached from Austin’s charms in a way she couldn’t seem to manage with Garrett. No wonder Paige wanted to steer clear of her old flame—when it came to this guy, the needle on the cute-o-meter was bobbing into the red zone, and there was a distinct danger of spontaneous combustion.

  For Paige, anyway.

  Austin tugged genially at his hat brim, every inch the cowboy. “I’ll be on my way, then,” he said, “if you’re sure you’re all right, that is.”

  Julie nodded to indicate that she was fine. “Thanks for stopping,” she said.

  Austin grinned and sprinted back to the truck.

  Julie straightened her shoulders, drew in and released a few deep breaths, and drove on.

  At school, the halls were jammed.

  Even though phone calls, texts and e-mails had probably been flying back and forth among them all weekend, the kids were eager to discuss the latest calamity—the fire at the Strivenses place—face-to-face.

  Julie wove her way through the crowd, catching a snatch of conversation here and there.

  …the McKettricks gave them a trailer to live in, and it’s practically brand-new…

  …the marching band wants to give a concert to raise money for groceries and stuff…

  …my mom says the Quilters’ Guild is planning to raffle off the project they worked on over the summer…

  By the time Julie stepped into her classroom, she was smiling.

  Kids could be ornery, no doubt about it, but deep down, they cared about each other, as did their parents. This was the Blue River Julie had known and loved all her life, the community that invariably rallied in the face of trouble, stood shoulder to shoulder, and saw things through to the finish.

  “Ms. Remington?”

  Julie was only mildly surprised to turn and see Rachel Strivens standing quietly next to one of the bookcases. “Good morning, Rachel,” she said, careful not to examine the child too closely or reveal any of the sympathy she felt.

  It would be only too easy for Rachel to mistake sympathy for pity.

  And pity was the last thing the girl needed.

  Rachel wore jeans that didn’t quite fit though they were good quality, along with a green sweater set with tiny matching buttons. She gazed earnestly at Julie for a long moment, swallowed and then said, “Do you think you could talk to my dad about—about how folks don’t mean any harm by giving us things?”

  Julie set her tote bag and purse in her desk chair, took off her coat and draped it over the back to deal with later. Before she could think what to say, Rachel went on.

  “He says we don’t need charity from the McKettricks or anybody else,” she said miserably. “My brothers, they think it’s Christmas, because people have been dropping stuff by since the men from the Silver Spur set the trailer down, just in front of the old one. They even hooked up the water and had the lights turned on. Folks bring groceries by the pickup load—clothes—new things, still in the boxes—you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I believe it,” Julie said, with a small smile. She’d been born and raised in Blue River, and she could recall a number of times when the entire town had stepped up. Whether it was a fire, a lost job, a tragic accident or a grave illness—as in her own father’s case—the locals invariably wanted to help.

  Tears welled up in Rachel’s eyes. “Dad’s got his pride,” she said. “He’s already talking about moving on, just as soon as he can get the rig running right.”

  Julie rested a hand on Rachel’s shoulder. The sweater set was soft—probably cashmere. She’d seen Cookie Becker in sophomore English wearing one much like it, and often. Cookie’s widowed father didn’t own a fancy ranch, practice a profession requiring advanced degrees or own stock in a technology firm or a software company. He worked at the tire store.

  “Will you talk to my dad?” Rachel asked again. “I don’t want to leave Blue River. Colley and Max don’t want to, either. Especially not now that we’ve got that nice trailer to live in and all these new clothes and good things to eat—”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Julie confirmed. “But that’s all I can promise.”

  Yes, she’d seen the community rise to occasions like this one, some easier, some more difficult, time and time again. Generally, people were grateful, glad to have the help. But she’d also seen folks on the receiving end get their backs up, shake their fists at anything smacking of charity and anybody offering it.

  Ron Strivens apparently fell into the latter group.

  “Thanks,” Rachel said, with more gratitude than the favor warranted, considering success was by no means a sure thing. After all, Julie hadn’t accomplished much the last time she’d tried to talk to Rachel’s dad.

  The first period bell rang then, the door of Julie’s classroom sprang open and her students poured in, a noisy river of laughter and slang, pushing and catcalls.

  Rachel took her usual seat, meeting no one’s eyes, keeping her slender back straight and her chin high.

  Her father wasn’t the only one in the family with pride, Julie thought.

  What had it taken for the child to ask for help?

  GARRETT WAS SORE AS HELL, but he saddled his horse anyhow and led it out of the barn, following behind Tate and the gelding, Stranger, into the morning sunshine. A large horse trailer waited in the yard, already hitched to a flatbed truck loaded with spools of barbed wire and various equipment.

  Today, they’d be riding the downed fence lines up near where they’d found the dead cattle the day before.

  Garrett had suggested taking the plane up again—it seemed like a good idea to him—but Tate refused, maintaining that the rustlers weren’t likely to be working in the daylight. The thing to do now, he figured, was fix fences.

  Tate was the eldest brother, and he was foreman.

  When it came to ranch work, he gave the orders. That was only right, Garrett figured, since Tate was the one holding down the fort while he and Austin ran loose.

  Garrett led the horse he’d chosen for the day up the ramp and into the trailer. He secured it among the half dozen others that had already been loaded and he and Tate walked back out into the light together.

  Garrett’s cell phone rang in the pocket of his jacket.

  Tate gave him a wry look, partly disgusted, but offered no comment.

  Seeing a familiar number in the panel, Garrett flipped the phone open and answered instead of letting the call go to voice mail, as he might have done otherwise.

  “Hello, Nan,” he said.

  Nan Cox was smiling; Garrett felt the force of it as surely as if she’d been standing in front of him.

  “Garrett,” the senator’s wife practically sang. “It’s so good to hear your voice.” What she meant: Shouldn’t you have called me?

  Tate shook his head, turned and walked away, leaving Garrett to hold the conversation in relative privacy.

  “How are you?” Garrett asked quietly. “How are the kids?”

  “Well, it’s nice of you to ask, Garrett.” Finally. “We’re all fine, considering that my husband and their father has evidently lost his mind.” A pause. “I really didn’t expect you to bail out like this. I was counting on you to help me straighten this thing out.”

  Garrett moved well away from the action surrounding the horse trailer and the flatbed truck. “I didn’t bail out, Nan,”
he said. “Morgan fired me.”

  “As I said,” Nan replied, “my husband is out of his mind.”

  “I’m sorry,” Garrett said. “That you and the children have to go through this, I mean.”

  “I didn’t think you were apologizing for the other part,” Nan said, with a sniff.

  Garrett said nothing. Tate and the others were ready to head out now; he was holding up the show.

  “Garrett,” Nan went on, “have you been watching the national news? Reading the papers? Surfing the Web? Surely you know what’s going on.”

  He knew, all right.

  The party had been pressuring Cox to resign, but the senator was still resisting the idea. According to Garrett’s private contacts, who e-mailed regular updates from various places behind the scenes, the power brokers were getting impatient. Pretty soon, they’d throw the bureaucratic equivalent of a butterfly net over the guy and shuffle him off to some hospital or rehab center.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he admitted, watching Tate, who was watching him back. He knew Nan was calling because she wanted a favor. He also knew she wouldn’t bring it up until she was ready, and there was no point in trying to hurry her along.

  One foot on the running board of his truck, Tate waved the driver of the flatbed on ahead. Watching as the trailer loaded with horses went by, tires flinging up dust, Garrett recalled what his brother had said about running the Silver Spur with little or no help, and he felt a stab of guilt.

  Garrett strode in Tate’s direction.

  “I need your help, Garrett,” Nan said, at long last.

  “Short of rejoining your husband’s staff,” Garrett said, pulling open the passenger-side door of Tate’s truck and climbing into the seat, “I’ll do anything I can. You know that.”

  Tate, behind the wheel now, slanted a look in Garrett’s direction before turning the key in the ignition.

  Nan finally laid it on the line, the real reason for her call. “Morgan is…on his ‘honeymoon,’ as he put it,” she said. “He called me a couple of minutes ago from some swanky ski resort in Oregon, expecting me to share in his joy, I guess.”

  “Wouldn’t that be bigamy?” Garrett asked.

  Nan’s chuckle was bitter. “Apparently, they decided to throw the honeymoon before the wedding. Morgan says he’s going to divorce me and marry Mandy. Morgan and Mandy, married in Mexico. On top of everything else, it’s alliterative.” She paused, collecting herself. “By some miracle, the press hasn’t picked up on any of this yet, but all hell will break loose when they do. That’s why I need you to help me.”

  “I don’t work for the senator anymore,” Garrett reiterated, though gently.

  “I understand that, Garrett. I’m asking you to work for me. I’ll pay you whatever you were getting before, plus 20 percent.”

  “That’s generous,” Garrett said cautiously.

  “Think about it,” Nan answered, sounding more like her old self again. She was quick on her feet; the daughter of a former Texas governor as well as the wife of a senator, she’d spent a lifetime on the fringes of politics. She knew the ins and outs. “And don’t take too long. The you-know-what is about to hit the fan. Besides, there are some other things we need to discuss in person. I’ve said more than I’m comfortable saying on a cell phone as it is.”

  Tate’s shoulders were tense, and though he kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel, Garrett could feel his brother stewing over there on the other side of the gear-shift. Clearly, he’d picked up on the gist of the conversation.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Garrett told Nan mildly.

  “Make it soon,” was Nan’s answer. In the next moment, she clicked off.

  Garrett shut his phone, tucked it away.

  Both he and Tate were silent for a long time.

  Scenery rolled by, but the trailer and the flatbed truck veiled most of it in one continuous cloud of road dust.

  “What I said before,” Tate began gruffly, flexing his fingers on the steering wheel.

  Garrett noticed that the knuckles were white. “Yeah?” he prompted, when his brother stopped talking, right in the middle of a sentence. He was always doing that, Tate was, but Garrett did it, too, and so did Austin.

  It seemed to run in the family.

  “About needing some help from you and Austin, I mean,” Tate said, then shut up again.

  Winding up this conversation was going to be a delicate process, Garrett figured, like pulling porcupine quills out of tender flesh.

  “Yeah,” Garrett said, keeping the conversational door ajar. “I remember.”

  The tires of the truck thunked over the ruts in the road, and then the cattle guard.

  “I didn’t mind it so much before,” Tate confessed. “Before Libby and I got together, I mean, and Audrey and Ava were spending every other week with their mother, but now—” He turned his head briefly, met Garrett’s eyes. “I was so lonesome back then, I was glad to put in the hours.”

  Garrett felt something thicken in his throat. For Tate, who had always played his cards close to his vest, this was unprecedented. “And now?”

  “Now, I want a life, Garrett. With Libby, with the kids.” He drew a deep breath, huffed it out. “I love this place. It’s been in the family for better than a hundred years. But I’d rather sell my share and move on than kill myself trying to run it alone.”

  “You’d sell?” Garrett couldn’t believe his ears. The Silver Spur was home. There were generations of McKettricks buried in the private cemetery just a mile from the house, including their parents. Their own kin had fought and died to hold on to that ranch for over a hundred years, through droughts and the Dirty ’30s, a dozen recessions and two world wars. And Tate was willing to pull out?

  “Like I said,” Tate told him gruffly. “I love this ranch. But I love Libby and the kids a lot more.”

  “You know damn well some big consortium would buy the place in a heartbeat—open the oil wells up again—clear out all the cowpunchers and their families—”

  Tate didn’t answer.

  They’d reached the place where they had to pull over, help unload the horses from the other truck, mount up and ride in. Once they got out of Tate’s rig, there would be no privacy.

  So Garrett stayed put.

  And when Tate moved to open his door, Garrett got him by the arm and held on, steely-strong.

  “I thought better of you, Tate,” he ground out. “I really thought better of you.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?” Tate snapped, turning to face Garrett straight on.

  “You’d never sell your share of the Silver Spur. You know Nan offered me a job just now, and you’re trying to goad me into turning it down.”

  The look in Tate’s eyes came as near to contempt as Garrett had ever seen, at least in his own brother’s face. “You know what, Garrett?” he asked, his voice low and dismissive. “If you think I operate like that, well, you can just go to hell.”

  “Tate—”

  Tate turned away, shoved the door open and got out.

  Slammed it behind him.

  Not to be outdone, Garrett slammed the door on his side, too.

  Charlie Bates, the man who’d no doubt expected to be ranch foreman after Pablo Ruiz died, stood behind the horse trailer, giving orders as the animals were led down the ramp, one after another. His small eyes darted from Tate to Garrett and back to Tate again, and a weird feeling burrowed into Garrett’s stomach lining like a red-hot worm.

  “You two look fit to butcher frozen beef without a knife,” Bates observed. “Is there something I ought to know?”

  Tate wouldn’t look at Garrett, but he glowered at Bates. “When I feel inclined to discuss my private life with you,” he said, “you’ll be the first one I tell.”

  Bates’s features seemed to contort a little, but it might have been an illusion, Garrett decided. The man wasn’t exactly the expressive type.

  Garrett’s horse came down the ramp, saddled, an
d he took the reins from the hand of the cowboy leading the animal and swung up onto its back.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said, echoing words he’d often heard his dad utter, back in the day. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”

  Bates got on his own horse, made it bump sides with Garrett’s.

  “You giving the orders now, Dos?” Bates asked.

  Dos. Garrett hadn’t been called “Two” since he couldn’t remember when, and the reference to his place in the McKettrick pecking order pissed him off, especially coming from Charlie Bates.

  “Some of them,” he answered, adjusting his hat.

  Bates spat tobacco, careful to just miss Garrett and his horse. “And what would those be?” he drawled.

  “Well, one of them would be to mind your own business.”

  “That so?” Bates grinned. Spat again, coming closer this time. “There’s another?”

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. “Clean up.”

  With that, he rode away, just naturally falling in alongside Tate and his horse, even though they weren’t speaking to each other at present.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALL THAT MORNING, the call from Gordon nibbled at the back of Julie’s mind, making concentration doubly difficult. Was it true that Calvin had been calling his dad without telling her? And if so, why?

  Was something troubling Calvin—how could she not have noticed?—and why had he confided in Gordon, a virtual stranger, and not in her?

  Okay, there were things a boy didn’t want to tell his mom, but Calvin could have talked to Libby or to Paige. He had a good relationship with Tate too, and Garrett, if he’d wanted to confide in a man.

  Why would he choose Gordon?

  Julie was burning to speak to Calvin, make sure everything was all right in his small but busy world, reassure him if he was frightened or disturbed about something.

  But she still had classes to teach, and the first round of tryouts scheduled for that afternoon and evening. Plus, she’d promised Rachel she’d have a word with Ron Strivens, try to smooth his pride-ruffled feathers, possibly get him to understand the difference between neighborly help and charity.