by Tina Leonard
“Damn, Cameron, it wasn’t that bad.” Anna looked at her sister as Cameron parked the truck.
“Bad enough for you to concoct a story and run away.”
“Yeah, but I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it.” Anna gathered up the food and drinks. “Thanks for letting me stay in Hell with you. It really gave me a new perspective on life.” She got out of the truck, ran inside to greet her mother and siblings.
Hell definitely could give anyone a new perspective. Cameron got out and slowly walked to the house to join everyone.
—
In the year that she’d been gone, the house seemed to have become duller, less crazy with confusion than Cameron remembered. Her mother’s red hair had taken on a gray and auburn cast, fading from the burnt red so similar to Cameron’s. Edith sat in the blue-painted kitchen, parked on a stool, smoking a joint and reading a week-old newspaper.
“Mom,” Cameron said, coming over to hug her.
“Cameron!” Edith hopped up. “You’re home!”
She nodded. “Yes, I am. Where is everyone?”
“Well, let’s see.” Edith passed her the joint, which Cameron put in an ashtray in a hurry. The kitchen was thick with pot fumes, and Cameron opened a window. “The boys have gone their separate ways, your sisters got jobs, and Anna got pregnant. I sent her to you when she got dumped by her lawyer boyfriend.”
Cameron sat on a stool, not happy to see her mother ticking off her children with her chipped, white-painted fingernails, leaving out details because she probably couldn’t remember them. An old anger flowed over Cameron. Their lives could have been so different if their dad had been anything like a devoted father and husband. “Mom, how many of these things do you smoke a day?”
Edith looked confused. “I don’t know. One for breakfast, one after dinner to help me sleep.”
Cameron looked at the dishes stacked in the sink. A moldy loaf of bread sat on the yellow Formica kitchen counter. “What can I do to help you?”
“I don’t know,” Edith asked in surprise. “Do I need help?”
Maybe she didn’t think she needed it. Maybe in her mother’s world, everything was just fine. Cameron shook her head, realizing Saint had been right about one thing: She hadn’t been home except for fast visits at the holidays, because she, too, had been running away. The past was painful to look at, and the lure of a better, different life had been strong. “I’m going to wash these dishes, okay?”
“You should sit down,” Edith said. “Those dishes aren’t going anywhere—they’ve been in the sink for a week. Tell me about your banking job in Dallas.”
A cold chill swept over Cameron. “Mom, I haven’t been in Dallas. I’ve been in Hell, Texas, training to become a bullfighter.”
Edith wrinkled her nose, toked gently and with contentment, pondering Cameron’s words. “That’s right, it’s Joy who’s gone to Dallas. Cindy went to Arkansas to take a teaching job. Marshall is in the Andes learning about sustainable farming, and Peter went up north to do something.” She furrowed the deep grooves in her forehead, lost in thought. “I remember now. Peter is trying out for a Broadway play, and Sam’s here with me, looking after things,” she said triumphantly, oblivious to the fact that Sam was in a wheelchair and should have been the one in the house with needs. “Jesus, I have a lot of kids.”
Cameron smiled. “Yeah. You do. I’m going to wash these dishes, then I’ll get out the Bush Hog.”
“Oh, don’t!” Edith followed her to the sink. “I want to hear about your job. You’re never home.” Her voice took on a pleading note. “That grass isn’t going to grow much between now and next week anyway.”
“What happens next week, Mom?”
“You never know,” Edith said. “But something always does.”
—
Saint lounged in the hammock, enjoying the advent of fall and the last lazy days of summer. Lucky still had half a bag of dog food left, so there was no hurry to get back to town. Lucky was also enjoying his beginning training as a gun dog, which Saint was conducting with a rag doll made of T-shirt strips he tossed into the creek for Lucky to retrieve. The puppy, now more a junior dog than a puppy, was proving himself a very enthusiastic retriever. Maybe when the dog food ran out, Saint would shoot a squirrel or a rabbit for Lucky’s meal, moving up his gun dog training to the next level.
He was seriously considering living out here forever.
His cell phone had long since died, a day after Cameron’s departure. But he’d let Declan and Trace know the Hell’s Outlaws Training Center was basically their baby for a while, at least until serious cold weather set in. Or maybe the holidays. His mother would have a fit if he didn’t make it to the Thanksgiving table. You could get away with a lot with Rose, but one thing you didn’t do was miss the holiday meals.
But for now, all he had to do was listen to the crickets and the birds, and the last shrills of the cicadas. He had a right badass beard going, and he was down to using baking soda for his toothpaste—which, he figured, was probably better for him anyway. Occasionally he ran out of groceries—mainly beer and ice—so he’d take the rowboat across the creek, jump in his truck, and hit up the next town over for the essentials. He knew he was becoming quite disreputable-looking, because people gave him a wide berth at the cash register. On his last trip he’d bought some deodorant just in case he was getting too ripe for civilization, and a little bit bigger box of baking soda. It was good for rinsing his clothes out in the sink, too.
A few more weeks like this, living like Grizzly Adams and communing with nature, and he’d be over Cameron for sure. He’d kicked himself for a while for not kissing her goodbye, stealing one last memory from those red velvet cake lips—but why torture himself? The goal was to exit that relationship—since she was determined to leave—with as little pain as possible.
He thought he heard a car engine, but that wasn’t possible. More likely a crop duster had passed somewhere overhead. He was too drowsy to give a shit, and too comfortably numb to get worked up about anything beyond the beer can he was resting on his stomach. Lucky, who’d decided he liked being in the hammock with him once Cameron had taught the pooch that dogs and hammocks went together like Sundays and fried chicken, lolled beside him, two great paws dangling over the edge, his head hogging most of the pillow as he snoozed.
“Lazy animal,” Saint muttered.
Which made two of them. And he was so steeped in his comforting numbness that the bucketful of icy water that hit his midsection was a complete, jarring surprise. “Judy!” He crawled out of the hammock, releasing a few juicy swearwords. Lucky hadn’t appreciated the splash, either, and jumped down to shake his coat indignantly.
Judy, bigger than life and more full of energy than ever, glared at Saint.
“What the hell, Mayor?”
“And well you might ask.” Judy stood stretched to her full six feet, clearly cross and ready to yell his ears off. “What have you done to my team?”
“I didn’t do anything.” He toweled off with an old rag, looked to see if his beer was ruined. “You’ve been gone two months. The team disintegrated. But you’re looking really good, Mayor,” he said, pleased that Judy’s blonde hair was towering in its usual meringue pouf and that she looked rested—and healthy. He was so glad to see her looking hearty, he was no longer upset about the cruel, watery interruption to his retreat.
“Why wouldn’t I look good?” Judy demanded suspiciously.
He sighed. Somebody in Hell had to tell her. She was going to have to explain some things to Steel, and a lot of other people. “Sit, Mayor. I’ll get you a drink. Water or beer?”
She perched, not very happily, on a wooden stool. “Both. But I’m not here for a social call. I’m here to kick your butt for killing my team.”
“You can’t blame this on me, Judy.”
“I left you in charge.”
“Someone was in charge, but it wasn’t me. Cameron needed to go home to her family, and Harper, hell, I d
on’t know where she is.”
“Apparently, Harper and Michael went back home.” Judy took the beer and water from him, displeased.
“You hadn’t left any instructions for your team to be paid, Judy,” he said gently. “Anyway, none of this matters. You can build a new team. How are you feeling?”
“Feeling?” She stared at him. “I feel fine. Why would you ask such a silly question?”
“Ivy told us you went to Austin to get cancer treatments,” he said, not about to let her bully him. Either Ivy had been telling the truth or she wasn’t, but Judy wouldn’t have been gone two months if Ivy hadn’t been on to something.
Judy scoffed. “Ivy has a big mouth.”
“So do you, except when you want to keep secrets. Out with it, Mayor.”
“I don’t care to discuss it.” She sipped her beer, her big eyes glaring at him over the can.
“What did you tell Steel? The sheriff moped around here for quite a while claiming you no longer loved him.”
Judy set the can down. “Don’t make this about me. Let’s figure out what you’re going to do to get my team back.” She pointed a finger at him. “You were never keen on my team, and as soon as I was gone, you turned into…this.”
He supposed she had something of a point. “Judy, I’m just doing a little mental wipe, that’s all. I promise you I didn’t do anything to hurt the team. In fact, I did everything I could to be supportive.”
She waited for him to say more, petting Lucky, who had glued himself to her leg for attention. Saint cleared his throat. He didn’t know what else to say.
“Judy, you didn’t pay them. They had to go. No one’s independently wealthy in Hell, and they weren’t, either.”
“So you didn’t fall in love with Cameron and refuse to commit to a relationship with her?”
“What? No!” He shook his head. “Who told you that?”
“Declan. He told me all about it.”
Rat fink. “No. Cameron and I were not in love.” He was in love, but she wasn’t.
Wait—I’m in love?
Of course he was. That’s why he was moping around like a sad dog. Hell, Lucky was in better spirits than he was.
“When’s the last time you bathed?” Judy demanded.
“I swim every morning in the creek. As does Lucky.” He felt a little defensive about the cleanliness issue, especially given the looks he got in the next town over when he’d gone in for supplies. “Excuse me if I wasn’t expecting to hold a tea party.”
“You look rather disreputable. In fact, you look like one of the Horsemen.”
Saint thought there was probably no greater insult he could have suffered, but he let it go. “Welcome home, Mayor,” he said, getting up to hug Judy as she held court on the stool. “We missed the hell out of you.”
“If you’d missed me, you would have taken care of my girls while I was gone.”
“Did it ever occur to you that Steel suffered terribly when you flaked out on him like that?”
She glared at him. “Don’t you dare!”
“All right, all right. I’m just saying, life hasn’t been perfect for anyone lately. How do you intend to make it up to him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice drifting away. “I don’t know if I can.”
He rubbed her back. “So, all bullshit and drama aside, do you have cancer?”
“I have a personal situation that I’m working on,” Judy said. “That’s all I’m willing to voice out loud.”
“So you’ll be needing a support group.”
She sighed. “You’ll be a sorry support group, but you’re better than nothing. However, you have to kill that bush that’s grown on your face. My God, that’s bound to frighten children.”
He smiled. “Where do we go from here?”
“We don’t go anywhere. You go get my team back.” She gave him a sour look.
“No can do.” He shook his head. “Judy, I know that for obvious reasons you weren’t thinking straight when you left, but those girls needed paying jobs. Harper had even taken a job at Redfeather’s, and though she improved the cuisine, it’s not what she came here for. You never had a real team to start with. They had to move on.” Frankly, he didn’t want to think about Hell without the Hell’s Belles. It was definitely going to be a whole lot quieter around town now—and a whole lot less pretty.
She got up. “I have to go. I promised Steel I’d be all his tonight. Dinner, the works. He wants to squire me around the town, show me off a bit, he said.”
“Big night at Redfeather’s, then.”
Judy tucked her pink shirt into her jeans, which had pink and red roses painted delicately on them. Fringe bounced from her long sleeves as she eyed him. “When you’ve been gone a while, Redfeather’s feels like coming home.”
“I remember.” He stood with her. “When we were overseas, all we could think about was coming home to Hell and sitting in our cracked leather booth.”
“And that’s what you do best,” Judy said crisply. “I’ll help you pack up.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he protested, knowing full well his sabbatical had just crashed to a halt. She raised a brow at him, a force to be reckoned with, and it was great, really great, to see her back to her old self. “Oh, hell, unhook the hammock.”
—
Once Saint plugged his cell phone into the charger, it pretty much exploded with messages, quite a few of them from his mother and sisters. Apparently, his mother had managed to catch the kitchen on fire—just a smoke fire, they said, nothing to worry about—but they wanted him to learn it from them rather than through the grapevine.
He showered and shaved off the offending beard—Judy was right, it was pretty scraggly—washed the hound, and headed out to his mother’s house. It wasn’t much, as houses went, parked way out in the county, but as the brown bricks of the sprawling ranch house squatting on open land used for hay and cows revealed itself, he thought it hadn’t been a bad place to grow up. Just lonely as hell for lack of male companionship, other boys his age to play with. The nearest friends had been five miles away.
He turned into the driveway, parking a good bit from the house so the chickens wouldn’t be startled. One thing about living this far from anyone else—walking five miles to visit friends had seemed like a piece of cake. Early training for becoming a SEAL. He’d been fit when he’d decided to go in, and the distance stuff hadn’t bothered him one bit.
“Mom!” he yelled, letting the screen door slam behind him. He smelled the harshness of smoke and the residue of mildew mingling together. When he got no answer, he and Lucky strolled into the kitchen. “Oh, shit.”
His sisters hadn’t quite been honest. This had been no small frying pan that had smoked and given everyone a scare. The kitchen was completely gone.
“Saint!” Rose came in behind him, threw her arms around his neck, hugging him tight. “It’s so good to see you!”
“Mom, what the hell?” he said, hugging her back. “What the hell happened?”
“Language, son.” Rose shook her silvery head. “I just let a pan get too hot.”
“No you didn’t. This didn’t happen because of a pan.”
She cleared her throat. “I left a candle burning. And who is this little fellow?” she asked, picking Lucky up. Lucky was thrilled by this event, repaying Rose with plenty of kisses on her chin.
Saint looked around. Everything was gone. The kitchen was pretty much knocked back to the studs; what wall was left was ebony with smoke. He could still smell the tang of fire haunting the room. “Mom, my God. Thank heaven you’re all right.” He hugged her again, and Lucky tried to get a lick in on his face, too.
“Well, it was stupid, son,” she said as he guided her into the living room to get away from the smell and the sorry results of the fire. “I put something in the microwave I shouldn’t have.”
He hesitated. “Okay. Go on.”
“I’ve been so absentminded! There’s so much going on
around here all the time. You know?”
Oh, he knew. Here in this house it was always a carnival and tornado at once. Which was why he craved Hell. It was usually pretty quiet there, except for the Honky-tonk, which he didn’t frequent often. “Yes, I do.”
“Well, I’d rolled some money up in tinfoil. A few hundred dollars, that’s all. My chicken money and a little extra from some sewing.” She gazed at him, her eyes bright behind her blue glasses. “And I hid it in the microwave accidentally. I meant to put the money in the freezer, but I was in a hurry that day.” She sighed. “We had a lot going on. Your sisters—”
“I know, Mom. Back to the money.” He knew all about the daily amusement park the family home was—it was both a curse and a blessing.
“I just forgot, is all.” She shrugged. “I’d meant to put my soup in the microwave and the money in the freezer, but I did it backwards. And I blew the microwave.”
He started to laugh, realized that would hurt his mother’s feelings. She was truly devastated by what she perceived as an inexcusably stupid error. “Mom, it’s okay. It happens.”
“It was actually pretty scary,” she said, and he hugged her again.
“It’s okay. I thought we talked about keeping money in the bank in Hawk.”
“I know,” Rose said, “but it’s a pain to drive over there.”
“How much do you have in the freezer? I can take some of it and put it in your account if you don’t want to drive over.”
“Just a little bit. Fifty thousand dollars,” she said, and he sighed.
Which meant she probably had very little in the bank. She wasn’t using her account at all, just stashing her earnings from selling chickens and eggs into the freezer. Monthly social security payments, he’d managed to convince her, were going into her account at the bank, so that money was secure—although she was convinced that neither the government nor the banks could be trusted. In her previous life, before marriage and five kids, Rose had been a highly respected PhD teaching anatomy at a community college. Anatomy and sometimes the classics. There was nothing Rose loved better than reading the classics, and books on anatomy and other subjects relating to science, which gave her a slightly rumpled, bookish, and absentminded air.
