Coming Home to Texas

by Allie Pleiter

  “Because of what happened with Derek?”

  “Here’s some biscuits,” said the server as she set down a big plate of fluffy, crusty squares. “Y’all ready to order?”

  Nash looked at Ellie for guidance. “I’ve got this,” she said to him before turning to the server. “A pound of fatty brisket, a pound of ribs, coleslaw and corn. And two root beers.” She raised an eyebrow at Nash. “They make the best root beer in the state just up the road and serve it here—do you like it?”

  Nash shrugged his shoulders. “It’s been a dozen years since I’ve had the stuff. I can’t remember.” He looked up at the server. “Why not?”

  The server left, and Ellie pulled her silverware from its red napkin wrapping. “You’re about to find out what real Texas barbecue is supposed to taste like. It’s going to ruin the rest of the country for you, just know that.” She slathered butter on one of the biscuits and took a bite. “Oh. Yep, nothing will ever come close after Red Boots. And I’m in the food biz, so I claim a hunk of expertise here.”

  “That’s mighty big hype for a hunk of beef. Someone might think you were in marketing.”

  Ellie laughed before taking another bite of biscuit. The tension of the afternoon began to slough off her neck and shoulders—whatever tension was left after that marvel of a car ride. Her brother Luke always talked about his motorcycles in terms of how the ride made him feel, and now she could begin to understand what he meant. Good food and pleasant company just added to the whole relaxing effect. She didn’t know Nash that well, but found him delightfully easy to talk to despite their stressful introduction.

  “You were telling me what happened with Derek and your job.”

  His cue yanked her back down to earth. “It’s probably the oldest story there is—guy cheats on girl with girl’s best friend. And the work thing just made it worse. I like working at GoodEats, I do. It’s just that, well, I never really felt like one of the team. I know I’m just starting out, but all the other staff seem to be these sophisticated, big-city types. Some days I feel like an invader from cowboy-land masquerading as a marketing professional.”

  Nash took a biscuit. “You must be good at your job if they’re willing to hold it for you while you’re here.”

  “I hate to admit it, but I think that might have been Derek’s doing. He pulls a lot of weight around there.” Ellie sat back. “I was so amazed when he first began to take notice of me. Little Ellie from nowhere catching the eye of the star chef. Here was a guy who’d been all over the world, who wore Italian suits and got hundred-dollar haircuts, but still went to church and loved grilled-cheese sandwiches. I thought he was amazing, and for him to notice me made me feel special, you know? Like I’d arrived in the real world to have this big-time chef—who could have anyone—want to be with me. I fell hard. He knew how to woo a girl, that’s for sure. It was like something out of a movie. Gifts, fancy events, romantic dinners on his rooftop deck and flowers—boy howdy, did that man know how to send flowers. When Derek proposed, I was over the moon.”

  A mountain of meat, piled high on white butcher paper alongside tubs of coleslaw and creamed corn, appeared at the table. Nash took in the scope of the enormous meal and grinned. “You weren’t kidding about the hungry part.”

  “Well,” she replied, not even needing a knife to separate a chunk of the oh-so-tender brisket to pull toward her side of the paper landscape laid out between them, “leftovers are pretty much a given when you come here. Gunner insists it’s the best breakfast ever, but that may be a guy thing.” She put the tangy, splendid meat in her mouth. “Forget everything you know about nutrition and just enjoy.”

  Nash pulled off a hunk for himself, and Ellie had fun watching his reaction to the barbecue. “Wow,” he said, his eyes closing in carnivorous delight. “This definitely lives up to the hype.” He looked at her. “You’re right. Everything else that claims to be barbecue after this is just going to seem like a knockoff to me.”

  Ellie chuckled. “It’s always a hoot to watch someone get their first taste of Red Boots. I suppose it’s kind of a rite of passage around here. I’m surprised no one’s taken you before this. You’ve been in town what—a little over two months?”

  Nash leaned on one elbow. “I haven’t exactly been social. I suppose I’ve been keeping to myself while I figure things out.”

  “Things like what?”

  “I was all about the job and the cause in LA. I was totally committed to my work and the kids. Lots of the guys I worked with had my home phone number and my cell, and they would call me at all hours when they got in trouble.” She watched his face change, a fierceness tightening his features with the memories. “It wasn’t an imposition—I liked it. I liked how they felt they could count on me, especially since these were guys who weren’t used to being able to rely on anyone. I could relate to that. We moved so much growing up I didn’t really have buddies, no guys I knew had my back. I felt a real calling to be that for some of those boys. They knew I was all in for them, and it’s what enabled some of them to break free of the gang hold and try for a better life. I felt like my commitment showed them they could belong somewhere else than in a gang.”

  “You must have made such a difference in their lives.” Listening to him talk, all her efforts at GoodEats seemed trivial. He had changed lives, and all she’d ever changed was this month’s pasta-special campaign. “That must feel good.”

  “It did.” He reached for one of the ribs. “But you know what they say—the people you let closest are the ones who can hurt you the most.”

  Ellie dug into the tub of coleslaw. “Derek made sure I learned that lesson.”

  “Where did things go wrong between the two of you? Or don’t you want to talk about it?”

  How many nights had she sat up pondering that question? She was fine if she kept busy during the day—which wasn’t hard to do on the ranch—but nights were another thing. Lying in bed, she had trouble shutting down her brain’s constant dissection of her and Derek’s relationship. The answers she came up with only made her feel worse. “No,” she replied. “It’s okay. I spend so much time thinking about it that talking it out might help. With someone who’s not family, I mean. Gunner, Brooke and Gran love me, I know, but their advice isn’t what I need right now, you know?”

  “I get that. For what it’s worth, I’ve got no advice whatsoever for you.” He licked sauce off his sticky fingers. “So feel free to bore me with all the juicy details.”

  * * *

  Nash watched Ellie pull off more brisket with a deliberate, artistic hand. He just piled meat on his side of the paper, but Ellie arranged it. “The way I see it,” she began, “it boils down to the truth that Derek and I each liked the idea of being married to each other, but in reality, we wanted something different.”

  Nash wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “You’re gonna have to explain that.”

  She gestured wildly as she talked. “I wanted a fancy guy. Sophisticated, a man of the world. Successful, well dressed, the whole package. And Derek was that. It’s just that the mind-set that came with it? That never sat right with me, even when I tried to convince myself that’s how successful people think and behave. Derek saw no reason to meet my family before he proposed—and didn’t expect me to meet his family, either. Except for Gunner’s wedding, he could never find time to come out here—not that I wasn’t guilty of the same thing. I missed a lot of chances to come back to the Blue Thorn because I was too busy making us into Atlanta’s next power couple. Ha-ha on me.” She gave a dark, bitter laugh as she dunked a hunk of brisket into the pool of sauce.

  “And then?”

  “It started showing up in the wedding plans. He wanted big and splashy, the best of everything—which makes sense. I mean, Derek’s taste and flair are what make him who he is.”

  Her confidence really had taken a hit from this guy. �
��Hey, you have taste and flair.”

  “Have you ever read the real estate ads?”

  Nash couldn’t quite see what that had to do with the current topic of conversation. “No.”

  “The small, sensible houses—the ones that are good enough but not showstoppers—have you ever noticed they are always called ‘charming’?” Her eyes narrowed at the last word.

  “No.”

  “Well, they are. And to Derek, everything I did and everything I liked was charming. He wanted to push me over into spectacular—that was his turf. He was always shifting my preferences a bit here, tweaking my choices a bit there, redoing everything. I thought it was attentiveness. I didn’t recognize it was for the revision it was. He was making me over into someone who could be his partner, and I let him. I liked it. He changed my hair, where I shopped for clothes, even how I drank my coffee. He called my knitting ‘charming’ and ‘Ellie’s quaint little hobby.’” The edge in her eyes showed how unforgivable she found that last remark, and Nash made a mental note never to use the words charming or quaint in her presence—certainly not to describe anything she loved as much as knitting.

  “Katie? Now, she was all elegance and style,” Ellie continued. “Everything that was effort for me came naturally to her. I felt fancy and important having her for my best friend. I thought we balanced each other out, the same way Derek and I balanced each other out.”

  Nash could see where this was headed. No wonder Ellie seemed to have lost her nerve—this Derek idiot clearly had decided he was better served by “trading up.” Nash had met women like Katie—even dated some of them until the shellac of their personalities had worn thin. He didn’t have to meet this Katie to know he wouldn’t like her and wouldn’t ever find her as authentic and genuine as the woman in front of him licking barbecue sauce off her fingers. He started to say something, but then decided it was better just to let Ellie keep talking.

  “At first he told me what he liked best about me was how different I was from him. I guess it became just too much effort to bridge the gap between us.” Her eyes glistened with the threat of tears. “On the really bad days I wonder if he just was ashamed of me, if I was some country girl he’d taken on as a project, whose amusement factor wore off when I couldn’t be fancied up enough.”

  Was it any wonder Nash had found her barreling down the highway back home that night? Her eyes were filled with hurt that ran way deep. He had a thing or two to say about Derek’s supposed taste.

  “We really thought we loved each other. I bought into the whole Prince Charming fantasy, you know?” Ellie swiped at her eye with a corner of her napkin. “Sorry. I’m still broken up about it.”

  Clearly. She was a mess—and deserved to be. “Hey, it’s okay.”

  “And it’s bad enough about Derek, but Katie? Her, too? What kind of best friend does that? How is it ever okay to betray someone like that?”

  Nash had been fascinated with women before, but never in love enough to propose marriage. He didn’t know how it felt to be engaged—or to have it all fall apart. The sting of betrayal, however? That he could relate to easily. How it dug right down to the bones, how it made you second-guess everything you thought you knew about people and relationships. “It’s never okay to betray someone like that, Ellie. If either one of them could do that to you, they don’t belong in your life or your heart.” He hadn’t meant to make a declaration like that, but the look in her eyes pulled it out of him.

  “Suddenly all my friends’ comments about ‘I never expected the two of you to get together’ and ‘I guess opposites really do attract’ made a bit too much sense. When word got out—and you can imagine how quickly it did—everyone was very sympathetic and sad, but they all had that little edge of...un-surprise that just made me want to die. As if no one had ever really expected it to work out in the first place.” She pulled in a deep breath. “Honestly, I felt like everyone had these comforting words, but behind them they were all just thinking ‘Nice try’ and ‘I could have told you so.’”

  He knew what it was like to feel as if someone had painted failure on his back. Sure, he had known many successes in his work with the teens in LA, but the one teen who had turned and shot him seemed to wipe all the rest off the map. Was it so hard to see how this one “failure” knocked Ellie’s confidence in all aspects of her life?

  She ran her finger down the side of her glass of root beer, making a little swirly trail in the condensation—even her fidgets were artistic. “I feel like I can’t do anything right. I mean, I know that’s not true, but I don’t trust my judgment. If I can be so wrong about something as big as planning to spend the rest of my life with someone like Derek, and everyone else could see what I couldn’t, then what can I count on? How can I trust myself or my choices?”

  “So it’s not really all about the bison fur, is it?” Even he could see this endeavor was just Ellie’s way of finding her confidence again. That didn’t make it wrong or silly; it just explained her over-the-top passion for something that didn’t strike him as especially urgent.

  “Not fur—the fiber’s called bison down, actually. And, yes, I suppose it’s about a lot more than just Blue Thorn Fibers.”

  “Oh, so you’ve picked out a name already.”

  She blushed. The pink in her cheeks did the most amazing thing to the color of her eyes. Nash chose to ignore the gentle thudding that had started in his gut. That, and the growing certainty that this Derek was a first-class fool who liked a slick, superficial life instead of real worth and didn’t know a good, honest treasure when he had one.

  “I certainly couldn’t let Gunner do it. He’s terrible at naming things. I can see the whole thing clearly in my head, you know. The colors, the weights, a few silk blends for the really fancy stuff, everything. People will pay a lot of money for good bison fiber.”

  Nash couldn’t help himself. “Okay, so I have to ask. What kind of good money?”

  “I’ve paid over seventy dollars for a really good skein of one hundred percent bison. It’s soft and light and strong—”

  “Seventy dollars? For yarn?”

  That got her back up. “And worth every penny. Can you sit there and tell me you haven’t paid good money for quality car parts?”

  There was an ashtray fixture he’d just ordered from Japan sitting in his garage ready to call that bluff. “Well, I suppose I see your point.” It was good to see the fight rise in her eyes—defeat didn’t become Ellie Buckton at all. “But I don’t see how the girls fit in to making the case for Blue Thorn Fibers. You wouldn’t really give such expensive stuff to girls just learning, would you?”

  “On the drive out here, you said you told the boys they could drive your car if they earned the right. This is the same thing. But more than that, I want them to help us make it. Maybe you saw the brushes we set up in the pastures when you were out there with Gunner. We used those to...” She put her hand up. “You’re not really interested in all the technical mumbo jumbo. I know I tend to—and this was Derek’s favorite term for it—overshare.”

  Again, this Derek jerk had taken what was one of her best qualities—her enthusiasm—and labeled it a fault. You’re so much better off without him, his brain yelled at the woman gleefully selecting her next rib, but he kept silent.

  “I always teach with good quality fiber and needles. It makes the whole experience so much more satisfying. Learning goes faster, and the results are always better. Surely you can see that.”

  Based on what he’d learned about his boys, he could see the flaw in her thinking. He had to tread carefully with what he said next. “I’m not so sure these girls have the cash to work with seventy-dollar yarn.”

  Ellie sat back. “Of course they don’t. Which is why they’ll help us make it. They’ll earn their yarn by the end of the program. What they’re working with now I paid for out of my own pocket.” When Nash t
ook a breath, she held up a hand again. “Don’t start. I know that’s not how it’s supposed to work, but Theo didn’t give me nearly enough money to do this right, and you said so yourself, this is about more than just yarn. I need this to work. I don’t mind the expense just this once.”

  Nash looked at Ellie and the energy practically zinging out of her fingertips. This woman never did anything halfway or “just this once.” How was she ever going to slide through these weeks and just hop on back to Atlanta?

  That’s not your problem, he told himself during dinner and on the drive home through the stunning night sky. Don’t make it your problem, either.

  Chapter Nine

  A bell clanged loudly Friday night as Ellie pushed open the door to Wylene’s Beauty Spot. The place hadn’t changed one molecule since Ellie’s high school days. Wylene stood in one corner arranging hair-care products. She wore a pale pink smock embroidered with her name on one side in swirly letters. Her head was piled high with a mountain of yellow-white hair so shellacked in place that as a child Ellie had believed Wylene took it off at night like a motorcycle helmet. The shop owner gave up a hoot and waved her arms. “Ellen May Buckton, as I live and breathe.” She shifted back on one hip and took in Ellie from head to toe. “Well, look at you, all citified.”

  Each of the six women in various stages of various treatments looked up with various degrees of welcome. Ellie, in a pair of cropped khaki pants and a patterned shirt that wouldn’t draw any attention in Atlanta, looked at the collection of young moms in T-shirts, jeans, yoga pants and ponytails. She had known each of these women when they were all teenagers, yet the older, parental faces they had now made them seem like total strangers. She’d talked herself into coming here—determined to make more substantive connections with Martins Gap’s twentysomethings—but now doubted the choice. She was the same age as these women, but Ellie didn’t feel nearly old enough to be a mom, much less a mom to twins like Dottie was. It had been a mistake to come. “Hi, y’all,” Ellie said as she waved, hoping her reluctance didn’t show in her meek greeting.