Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I’ll make sandwiches,” Kendra said, and turned to duck-waddle toward the ranch house. Compared with Boone’s double-wide, the place looked like a palace, with its clapboard siding and shining windows, and for the first time in his life, Boone wished he had a fine house like that to bring his children home to.

  “Don’t—” Boone protested, but it was too late. Kendra was already opening the screen door, stepping into the kitchen beyond.

  “Let her build you a lunch, Boone,” Hutch urged, his voice as quiet as his manner. Since the wedding, he’d been downright Zen-like. “She’ll be quick about it, and she wants to help whatever way she can. We all do.”

  Boone nodded, cleared his throat, looked away. Hutch’s dog, a black mutt named Leviticus, trotted over to nose Boone’s hand, his way of saying howdy. Kendra’s golden retriever, Daisy, was there, too, watchful and wagging her tail.

  Boone ruffled both dogs’ ears, straightened, looked Hutch in the eye again. Neither of them spoke, but it didn’t matter, because they’d been friends for so long that words weren’t always necessary.

  Boone was worried about bringing the boys back to his place for anything longer than a holiday weekend, and Hutch knew that. He clearly cared and sympathized, but at the same time, he was pleased. There was no need to give voice to the obvious.

  Kendra returned almost right away, moving pretty quickly for somebody who could be accused of smuggling pumpkins. She carried a bulging brown paper bag in one hand, holding it out to Boone when she got close enough. “Turkey on rye,” she said. “With pickles. I threw in a couple of hard-boiled eggs and an apple, too.”

  He took the bag, muttered his thanks, climbed into Hutch’s truck and reached through the open window to hand over the keys to the rust-bucket he’d driven up in. Some swap that was, he thought ruefully. His old buddy was definitely getting the shitty end of this stick.

  “Give Molly and Bob our best!” Kendra called after him, as Boone started up the engine and shifted into Reverse. “If there’s anything we can do—”

  Boone cut her off with a nod, raised a hand in farewell and drove away.

  After a brief stop in Parable, to get some cash from an ATM, he’d keep the pedal to the metal all the way to Missoula. Once there, he and Molly would explain things, together.

  God only knew how his sons would take the news—they were always tentative and quiet on visits to Parable, like exiles to a strange new planet, and visibly relieved when it was time to go back to the city.

  One thing at a time, Boone reminded himself.

  * * *

  TARA KENDALL STOOD in front of her chicken coop, surrounded by dozens of cackling hens, and second-guessed her decision to leave a high-paying, megaglamorous job in New York and reinvent herself, Green Acres–style, for roughly the three thousandth time since she’d set foot in Parable, Montana, a couple years before.

  She missed her small circle of friends back East, and her twelve-year-old twin stepdaughters, Elle and Erin. She also missed things, like sidewalk cafés and quirky shops, Yellow Cab taxis and shady benches in Central Park, along with elements that were harder to define, like the special energy of the place, the pure purpose flowing through the crowded streets like some unseen river.

  She did not, however, miss the stress of trying to keep her career going in the midst of a major economic downturn, with her ex-husband, Dr. James Lennox, constantly complaining that she’d stolen his daughters’ love from him when they divorced, along with a chunk of his investments and real estate assets.

  Tara didn’t regret the settlement terms for a moment—she’d forked over plenty of her own money during their rocky marriage, helping to get James’s private practice off the ground after he left the staff of a major clinic to go out on his own—and as for the twins’ affection, she’d gotten that by being there for Elle and Erin, as their father so often hadn’t, not by scheming against James or undermining him to his children.

  Even if Tara had wanted to do something as reprehensible as coming between James and the twins, there wouldn’t have been any need, because the girls were formidably bright. They’d figured out things for themselves—their father’s serial affairs included. Since he’d never seemed to have time for them, they’d naturally been resentful when they found out, quite by accident, that their dad had bent his busy schedule numerous times to take various girlfriends on romantic weekend getaways.

  Tara’s golden retriever, Lucy, napping on the shady porch that ran the full length of Tara’s farmhouse, raised her head, ears perked. In the next instant, the cordless receiver for the inside phone rang on the wicker table set between two colorfully cushioned rocking chairs.

  Hurrying up the front steps, Tara grabbed the phone and said, “Hello?”

  “Do you ever answer your cell?” her former husband demanded tersely.

  “It’s charging,” Tara said calmly. James loved to argue—maybe he should have become a lawyer instead of a doctor—and Tara loved to deprive him of the satisfaction of getting a rise out of her. Then, as another possibility dawned on her, she suppressed a gasp. “Elle and Erin are all right, aren’t they?”

  James remained irritable. “Oh, they’re fine,” he said scathingly. “They’ve just chased off the fourth nanny in three weeks, and the agency refuses to send anyone else.”

  Tara bit back a smile, thinking of the mischievous pair. They were pranksters, and they got into plenty of trouble, but they were good kids, too, tenderhearted and generous. “At twelve, they’re probably getting too old for nannies,” she ventured. James never called to chat, hadn’t done that even when they were married, standing in the same room or lying in the same bed. No, Dr. Lennox always had an agenda, and she was getting a flicker of what it might be this time.

  “Surely you’re not suggesting that I let them run wild, all day every day, for the whole summer, while I’m in the office, or in surgery?” James’s voice still had an edge to it, but there was an undercurrent of something else—desperation, maybe. Possibly even panic.

  “Of course not,” Tara replied, plunking down in one of the porch rocking chairs, Lucy curling up at her feet. “Day camp might be an option, if you want to keep them busy, or you could hire a companion—”

  “Day camp would mean delivering my daughters somewhere every morning and picking them up again every afternoon, and I don’t have time for that, Tara.” There it was again, the note of patient sarcasm, the tone that seemed to imply that her IQ was somewhere in the single digits and sure to plunge even lower. “I’m a busy man.”

  Too busy to care for your own children, Tara thought but, of course, didn’t say. “What do you want?” she asked instead.

  He huffed out a breath, evidently offended by her blunt question. “If that attitude isn’t typical of you, I don’t know what is—”

  “James,” Tara broke in. “You want something. You wouldn’t call if you didn’t. Cut to the chase and tell me what that something is, please.”

  He sighed in a long-suffering way. Poor, misunderstood James. Always so put-upon, a victim of his own nobility. “I’ve met someone,” he said.

  Now there’s a news flash, Tara thought. James was always meeting someone—a female someone, of course. And he was sure that each new mistress was The One, his destiny, harbinger of a love that had been written in the stars instants after the Big Bang.

  “Her name is Bethany,” he went on, sounding uncharacteristically meek all of a sudden. James was a gifted surgeon with a high success rate; modesty was not in his nature. “She’s special.”

  Tara refrained from comment. She and James were divorced, and she quite frankly didn’t care whom he dated, “special” or not. She did care very much, however, about Elle and Erin, and the fact that they always came last with James, after the career and the golf tournaments and the girlfriend du jour. Their own mother, James’s first wife, Susan, had contracted a bacterial infection when they were just toddlers, and died suddenly. It was Tara who had rocked the little girls to
sleep, told them stories, bandaged their skinned elbows and knees—to the twins, she was Mom, even in her current absentee status.

  “Are you still there?” James asked, and the edge was back in his voice. He even ventured a note of condescension.

  “I’m here,” Tara said, after swallowing hard, and waited. Lucy sat up, rested her muzzle on Tara’s blue-jeaned thigh, and watched her mistress’s face for cues.

  “The girls are doing everything they can to run Bethany off,” James said, after a few beats of anxious silence. “We need some—some space, Bethany and I, I mean—just the two of us, without—”

  “Without your children getting underfoot,” Tara finished for him after a long pause descended, leaving his sentence unfinished, but she kept her tone moderate. By then she knew for sure why James had called, and she already wanted to blurt out a yes, not to please him, but because she’d missed Elle and Erin so badly for so long. Losing daily contact with them had been like a rupture of the soul.

  James let the remark pass, which was as unlike him as asking for help or giving some hapless intern, or wife, the benefit of a doubt. “I was thinking—well—that you might enjoy a visit from the twins. School’s out until fall, and a few weeks in the country—maybe even a month or two—would probably be good for them.”

  Tara sat up very straight, all but holding her breath. She had no parental rights whatsoever where James’s children were concerned; he’d reminded her of that often enough.

  “A visit?” she dared. The notion filled her with two giant and diametrically opposed emotions—on the one hand, she was fairly bursting with joy. On the other, she couldn’t help thinking of the desolation she’d feel when Elle and Erin returned to their father, as they inevitably would. Coping with the loss, for the second time, would be difficult and painful.

  “Yes.” James stopped, cleared his throat. “You’ll do it? You’ll let the twins come out there for a while?”

  “I’d like that,” Tara said carefully. She was afraid to show too much enthusiasm, even now, when she knew she had the upper hand, because showing her love for the kids was dangerous with James. He was jealous of their devotion to her, and he’d always enjoyed bursting her bubbles, even when they were newlyweds and ostensibly still happy. “When would they arrive?”

  “I was thinking I could put them on a plane tomorrow,” James admitted. He was back in the role of supplicant, and Tara could tell he hated it. All the more reason to be cautious—there would be a backlash, in five minutes or five years. “Would that work for you?”

  Tara’s heartbeat picked up speed, and she laid the splayed fingers of her free hand to her chest, gripping the phone very tightly in the other. “Tomorrow?”

  “Is that too soon?” James sounded vaguely disapproving. Of course he’d made himself the hero of the piece, at least in his own mind. The self-sacrificing father thinking only of his daughters’ highest good.

  What a load of bull.

  Not that she could afford to point that out.

  “No,” Tara said, perhaps too quickly. “No, tomorrow would be fine. Elle and Erin can fly into Missoula, and I’ll be there waiting to pick them up.”

  “Excellent,” James said, with obvious relief. Not “thank you.” Not “I knew I could count on you.” Just “Excellent,” brisk praise for doing the right thing—which was always whatever he wanted at the moment.

  That was when Elle and Erin erupted into loud cheers in the background, and the sound made Tara’s eyes burn and brought a lump of happy anticipation to her throat. “Text me the details,” she said to James, trying not to sound too pleased, still not completely certain the whole thing wasn’t a setup of some kind, calculated to raise her hopes and then dash them to bits.

  “I will,” James promised, trying in vain to shush the girls, who were now whooping like a war party dancing around a campfire and gathering momentum. “And, Tara? Thanks.”

  Thanks.

  There it was. Would wonders never cease?

  Tara couldn’t remember the last time James had thanked her for anything. Even while they were still married, still in love, before things had gone permanently sour between them, he’d been more inclined to criticize than appreciate her.

  Back then, it seemed she was always five pounds too heavy, or her hair was too long, or too short, or she was too ambitious, or too lazy.

  Tara put the brakes on that train of thought, since it led nowhere. “You’re welcome,” she said, carefully cool.

  “Well, then,” James said, clearly at a loss now that he’d gotten his way, fresh out of chitchat. “I’ll text the information to your cell as soon as I’ve booked the flights.”

  “Great,” Tara said. She was about to ask to speak to the girls when James abruptly disconnected.

  The call was over.

  Of course Tara could have dialed the penthouse number, and chatted with Elle and Erin, who probably would have pounced on the phone, but she’d be seeing them in person the next day, and the three of them would have plenty of time to catch up.

  Besides, she had things to do—starting with a shower and a change of clothes, so she could head into town to stock up on the kinds of things kids ate, like cold cereal and milk, along with those they tended to resist, like fresh vegetables.

  She needed to get the spare room aired out, put sheets on the unmade twin beds, outfit the guest bathroom with soap and shampoo, toothbrushes and paste, in case they forgot to pack those things, tissues and extra toilet paper.

  Lucy followed her into the house, wagging her plumy tail. Something was up, and like any self-respecting dog, she was game for whatever might happen next.

  The inside of the farmhouse was cool, because there were fans blowing and most of the blinds were drawn against the brightest part of the day. The effect had been faintly gloomy, before James’s call.

  How quickly things could change, though.

  After tomorrow, Tara was thinking, she and Lucy wouldn’t be alone in the spacious old house—the twins would fill the place with noise and laughter and music, along with duffel bags and backpacks and vivid descriptions of the horrors wrought by the last few nannies in a long line of post-divorce babysitters, housekeepers and even a butler or two.

  She smiled as she and Lucy bounded up the creaky staircase to the second floor, along the hallway to her bedroom. Most of the house was still under renovation, but this room was finished, having been a priority. White lace curtains graced the tall windows, and the huge “garden” tub was set into the gleaming plank floor, directly across from the fireplace.

  The closet had been a small bedroom when Tara had purchased the farm, but she’d had it transformed into every woman’s dream storage area soon after moving in, to contain her big-city wardrobe and vast collection of shoes. It was silly, really, keeping all these supersophisticated clothes when the social scene in Parable called for little more than jeans and sweaters in winter and jeans and tank tops the rest of the time, but, like her books and vintage record albums, Tara hadn’t been able to give them up.

  Parting with Elle and Erin had been sacrifice enough to last a lifetime—she’d forced herself to leave them, and New York, in the hope that they’d be able to move on, and for the sake of her own sanity. Now, they were coming to Parable, to stay with her, and she was filled with frightened joy.

  She selected a red print sundress and white sandals from the closet and passed up the tub for the room just beyond, where the shower stall and the other fixtures were housed.

  Lucy padded after her in a casual, just-us-girls way, and sat down on a fluffy rug to wait out this most curious of human endeavors, a shower, her yellow-gold head tilted to one side in an attitude of patient amazement.

  Minutes later, Tara was out of the shower, toweling herself dry and putting on her clothes. She gave her long brown hair a quick brushing, caught it up at the back of her head with a plastic squeeze clip and jammed her feet into the sandals. Her makeup consisted of a swipe of lip gloss and a light coat of m
ascara.

  Lucy trailed after her as she crossed the wider expanse of her bedroom and paused at one particular window, for reasons she couldn’t have explained, to look over at Boone Taylor’s place just across the field and a narrow finger of Big Sky River.

  She sighed, shook her head. The view would have been perfect if it wasn’t for that ugly old trailer of Boone’s, and the overgrown yard surrounding it. At least the toilet-turned-planter and other examples of extreme bad taste were gone, removed the summer before with some help from Hutch Carmody and several of his ranch hands, but that had been the extent of the sheriff’s home improvement campaign, it seemed.

  She turned away, refusing to succumb to irritation. The girls were as good as on their way. Soon, she’d be able to see them, hug them, laugh with them.

  “Come on, Lucy,” she said. “Let’s head for town.”

  Downstairs, she took her cell phone off the charger, and she and the dog stepped out onto the back porch, walked toward the detached garage where she kept her sporty red Mercedes, purchased, like the farm itself, on a whimsical and reckless what-the-hell burst of impulse, and hoisted up the door manually.

  Fresh doubt assailed her as she squinted at the car.

  It was a two-seater, after all, completely unsuitable for hauling herself, two children and a golden retriever from place to place.

  “Yikes,” she said, as something of an afterthought, frowning a little as she opened the passenger-side door of the low-slung vehicle so Lucy could jump in. Before she rounded the front end and slid behind the steering wheel, Tara was thumbing the keypad in a familiar sequence.

  Her friend answered with a melodic, “Hello.”

  “Joslyn?” Tara said. “I think I need to borrow a car.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  LIKE TRAFFIC LIGHTS, ATMs were few and far between in Parable, which was why Boone figured he shouldn’t have been surprised to run into his snarky—if undeniably hot—neighbor, Tara Kendall, right outside Cattleman’s First National Bank. He was just turning away from the machine, traveling cash in hand, his mind already in Missoula with his boys and the others, when Tara whipped her jazzy sports car into the space next to his borrowed truck. She wore a dress the same cherry-red as her ride, and her golden retriever, a littermate to Kendra’s dog, Daisy, rode beside her, seat belt in place.