by Brenda Novak
He’d also been sidekick to Josh Hill all through high school. But then, her parents didn’t understand her feelings toward Josh, either. They’d worshipped him ever since his family moved in across the street twenty-four years ago. Especially her father. From the beginning, if Josh got into a brawl at school or skipped class to catch frogs in the nearby creek, her father would say, “He’s all boy, isn’t he?” And there was no mistaking the pride in his voice. In high school, if Josh was caught with his hand up Lula Jane’s blouse or sticking his tongue down Betty Carlisle’s throat behind the bleachers, her father wouldn’t go on about the evils of promiscuity. He and Josh’s father would dismiss it with a wink and a nudge, then slap Josh on the butt and tell him he played one helluva football game.
Maybe the double standard wouldn’t have bothered Rebecca so much if her father hadn’t wanted a son so desperately. But she knew, as the youngest, she’d been Doyle Wells’s last hope for a boy, and he wasn’t happy she’d failed him. The suspicion that he’d rather have the boy across the street than his youngest daughter had soon made Josh the bane of Rebecca’s existence. She’d immediately set out to conquer and defeat—or at least to prove that anything he could do, she could do better. If Josh climbed a tree, she climbed higher. Once she fell and broke her arm and he had to run for help, but that didn’t put an end to the rivalry that raged between them. Her humiliation only escalated it. If Josh hopped a fence, or waded through the creek on his way to school, ruining his clothes, she proved she wasn’t afraid to do the same.
Though her father generally reacted with something far less than pride, she did have a few moments of glory. On Josh’s ninth birthday, when he received his first two-wheeled bicycle, she challenged him to a race around the block and somehow managed to beat him. Her father was absolutely beaming when she crossed the finish line; his father was not.
So much for glory days, Rebecca thought as she immersed the lettuce in cold water and started ripping it into pieces. Sheer determination couldn’t make up for Josh’s advantage in size and strength forever, so Rebecca had been forced to find other areas in which to assert herself. If Josh ran for student body president, she ran against him—and lost. If Josh took debate, she challenged him on the other side of the argument—and thanks to her sharp tongue, usually won. If Josh made honor roll, she tried for Principal’s List—and most semesters fell laughably short.
Fortunately life with Josh as part of the community eventually achieved a sort of precarious equilibrium. Once they graduated from high school, he went off to college in Utah and she went to massage school in Iowa before changing her mind and going to beauty school, instead. When they both returned to Dundee, they pretty much left each other alone. Until that hot August night a year ago last summer. What happened then, Rebecca couldn’t explain. She didn’t even want to think about it. She could only concede that Josh had come a long way since the age of eight. He was now six-four and two hundred pounds of lean hard muscle—which she knew because she’d had the pleasure of exploring nearly every inch of him.
“Are you going to answer me?” her mother prodded.
Rebecca’s throat had gone dry at the memory of Josh’s bare chest. “What was the question?” she asked, shoving his image from her mind.
“I want to know why you don’t like your brother-in-law.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have to like him. I’m not the one who married him.” Shaking water off the leaves, she tossed them into the bowl she’d removed from one of the glass-fronted cupboards. Like everything else—the sink, the counters, the appliances and the tile floor—the cupboards were so white the reflection of the setting sun, streaming unchecked through large square windows running along the entire back of the house, nearly blinded her. The windows and the shiny new kitchen were the results of a recent renovation. The old kitchen had been avocado-green and brown—a color scheme Rebecca hoped would never gain popularity again.
Her mother scraped the onions into a frying pan and added a pat of butter. “But he’s a great guy. What’s not to like?”
“Nothing. Forget it,” Rebecca said.
“Now that you’ve brought up it up, I’d finally like to know.”
“The memories we have of each other from high school aren’t the most pleasant, that’s all.”
“What memories?”
Most of them had far more to do with Josh Hill than Randy, but Randy had been constantly at Josh’s elbow, which meant he was included. “We had a few run-ins,” she said vaguely.
“Because he was a friend of Josh Hill’s?”
Unfortunately the conversation was drifting toward Josh and she wasn’t sure she could stop it. “Maybe.”
“So we’re not really talking about Randy. We’re talking about Joshua.”
“No, I’m not talking about Josh. I never talk about Josh,” Rebecca responded.
Her mother found a spatula in the drawer and began stirring the sizzling onions. “Well, perhaps it’s time you did,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to get to the bottom of this feud between you two. We love Josh and his older brother. His parents are good friends of ours.”
Rebecca sighed. “I know. But it’s too late to improve relations between Josh and me, so don’t get it in your head to try. The bad blood between us is old, old news.”
“That might be the case, but I want you to bury whatever grudge you’re holding against him.”
“Are you kidding?” Rebecca paused in her knife attack on the radishes. The sudden absence of her rapid thump, thump, thump made the silence seem loud. “What’s the point? We run into each other a lot, but it’s only in passing. We could go on like this indefinitely. There’s no reason to change anything.”
“Now there is. You’ll soon be seeing each other more than in passing.”
“That sounds pretty specific. When?” And Rebecca had thought Buddy’s news was the worst she could receive.
“Your sisters are planning an anniversary celebration for your father and me. It’s in two weeks.”
The scent of her mother’s grilled onions became almost overpowering. “Somehow I knew you didn’t invite me over to talk about candles.”
“I did find some good candles,” her mother said.
Rebecca retrieved two stalks of celery from the fridge, washed them and started chopping them on the cutting board. She realized she could probably avoid the subject of Josh by using the candles to segue into Buddy’s postponement of the wedding. But the words stuck in her throat when she envisioned what her experience at the anniversary party would be like if she mentioned her latest setback too soon. “Heard you and Buddy are waiting a few weeks longer…You think that boy really knows what he wants?…Musta figured out what he was getting himself into, huh?” (said with a hearty chuckle).
Deciding that it would be much better to wait until after her parents’ anniversary, she plunged back into the subject of Josh Hill. “What does this party have to do with me and Josh? We can attend the same function without causing a scene.”
Her mother looked less than optimistic. “Like you did at Delia’s wedding?”
Rebecca threw the core of the lettuce in the trash compactor. “Is that what this is all about? You blame me for what happened at Delia’s wedding? I’ve told you, it wasn’t my fault.”
“Then whose fault was it?” her mother wanted to know. “You can’t blame Josh, not when you were the one who tripped him.”
“He only thought I was going to trip him. He overreacted.” She’d said so before, but no one seemed to care.
“Regardless, he fell into the cake and took the whole food table down with him.” Her mother winced at the painful memory.
“I told you, it was his mistake.”
“Maybe. But you’re the one who darted away from him at the last second and ran smack into the punch fountain, dousing your poor sister. She was so sticky, she had to miss the end of her own reception to change and shower. By the time she and Brad left on their honeymoon, her eyes were
swollen, her nose was red from crying, and her hair and dress were ruined.”
“Okay, the punch part might’ve been my fault,” Rebecca conceded. “Josh grabbed at me when he fell and I was trying to get away so he couldn’t pull me down with him.”
“Better you fall in an undignified heap than the bride gets sprayed with punch. It wasn’t a pleasant thing for Delia to—”
The door banged open as her father strode in from the garage, briefcase in hand, and whatever her mother was about to say was immediately lost in the human power surge. Loud, authoritative and supremely confident, her father commanded respect simply by being. The fact that he’d been the mayor of Dundee since Rebecca was in high school, was well over six feet and resembled Billy Graham certainly didn’t hurt. “Did you tell her?” he demanded the moment he spotted Rebecca.
Her mother gave him one of her famous warning looks and cleared her throat. “Actually, Doyle, we were just getting around to—”
“Tell me what?” Rebecca interrupted, meeting her father’s direct gaze. He might not approve of her, but she wasn’t going to flinch in his presence like everyone else. And she sure as heck wasn’t going to use her mother as a go-between.
“That you’re not invited to the anniversary celebration unless you can behave yourself,” he said point-blank. “I’ve had it with this thing between you and Josh Hill. I won’t have you embarrassing me again.” With that, he stalked from the kitchen, presumably to change out of his suit.
Rebecca put down the knife she’d been rinsing and let her wet hands dangle in the sink. “Not everyone sees Josh Hill through the same rose-colored glasses you do, Dad,” she called after him.
“That would only be you,” he hollered back. “Everyone else in this town knows Josh for what he is—an ambitious young man with a shrewd business mind. That boy’s going to make something of himself someday. You wait and see.”
“And I’m not? Is that what you’re implying?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Though Rebecca loved her profession, she knew that in her parents’ opinion, a hairstylist—even an accomplished hairstylist—could never compare to a successful horse breeder like Josh. Josh Hill had somehow been able to win the love and approval she’d always craved, especially from her father. But what bothered her most was that he’d done it so effortlessly and so long ago. How could she compete with someone so well entrenched in her father’s affections?
She hadn’t been able to compete with Josh at seven. She couldn’t compete with him now. She wasn’t even sure why she kept trying.
After finishing the salad, she set it on the table and retrieved her keys.
“Where are you going?” her mother asked, alarmed. “Aren’t you staying for dinner?”
Rebecca pictured the moment her sister and the kids arrived; she pictured sitting across the table from her father. “No, Dad already took care of what you both wanted to say. Consider me warned,” she said and headed for the entry.
“Rebecca?”
She paused.
“He doesn’t mean to sound so harsh, honey,” her mother said softly.
“Oh, he meant it all right,” she said. Rebecca wasn’t sure about a lot of things—why Buddy kept putting off their wedding, why she’d gone home with Josh a year ago last summer (and how she’d even started dancing with him in the first place), why she didn’t really fit into her own family. But she knew her father had meant every word.
* * *
REBECCA SAT on her back step as darkness fell, and lit up a cigarette. She’d managed to get through yesterday without smoking, despite Buddy’s call, but one visit to her parents’ house and—POOF—there went her resolve. What difference did it make, anyway? She couldn’t change her stripes. Even if she decided to become a nun, the good folks of Dundee would find something to criticize, her father chief among them.
At least she’d come by her reputation honestly. She’d raised eyebrows in Dundee more times than she could count and had certainly given Josh a run for his money in their younger days. She still remembered filling his locker with pincher bugs, spray-painting “Josh Sucks” on the sidewalk in front of his house and telling everyone that his penis was a mere three inches long (without adding that she was going by information gleaned ten years earlier in a classic “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”).
Contrary to popular belief, however, he was hardly blameless. He’d retaliated by jamming her locker so she couldn’t open it, which made her fail an English test because she couldn’t turn in the essay she’d written the night before. He and Randy stole a pair of panties from her gym locker and ran them up the flagpole. And Josh had offered to give her a more current measurement of his penis. She’d refused, of course. But plenty of other girls had come forward to vouch for something far more impressive than three inches. Taken with his football prowess, even her accusation of a small penis wasn’t enough to dent Josh’s overwhelming popularity.
Rebecca was the only one, it seemed, who didn’t worship Josh Hill. And that hadn’t changed over the years. No matter what happened, her father remained one of his staunchest supporters.
A staunch supporter of the enemy. She grimaced and took another drag on her cigarette. About Josh, her father always said, “He’s made his parents proud, hasn’t he?” About Rebecca her father always said, “God tries us all.”
Oh well, nothing in Dundee was going to matter when she moved to Nebraska, she told herself. But that line of reasoning didn’t pack the same power it used to because she was no longer sure she’d be moving to Nebraska. Buddy had left several messages on her answering machine today, but she didn’t feel like returning them. She felt like sitting on the steps, smoking one cigarette after another, watching the moths hover about her porch light. Autumn was here. The leaves were turning, the days growing shorter. Rebecca had always loved the crisp mountain air, and she wondered if Nebraska was very different. She’d only visited there once, the past spring….
If she did move, she’d miss autumn in Idaho. And she’d miss Delaney.
Picking up the cordless phone she’d carried outside with her, she dialed her best friend at the ranch where Delaney now lived with her husband, Conner Armstrong.
“You’re smoking again,” Delaney said, almost as soon as she answered.
Rebecca exhaled. “That’s the first thing you’ve got to say to me?”
“You promised me you were going to quit for real this time.”
Rebecca removed her cigarette and watched the smoke curl up into the sky. “Yeah, well, that was before I went over to my parents’ tonight. Be grateful I’m only smoking.”
“Something happen at your folks?”
After another long drag, Rebecca stubbed out her cigarette, then stretched her legs. “Nothing new. How’s the pregnancy?”
“The doctor says everything looks fine.”
“Good. Hard to believe you’re almost ready to pop. The past few months have gone fast.” In fact, considering that Rebecca and Buddy had been engaged before Delaney even met Conner, time had streaked by. Delaney was starting a family; Rebecca was trying to work up the nerve to tell everyone her wedding had just been postponed again.
“I’m big enough that it’s getting a little uncomfortable,” Delaney complained. “I’ve lost my toes.”
Rebecca thought she wouldn’t mind gaining twenty-five pounds and losing sight of her toes if it meant a baby. “Guess that goes with the territory, huh? Did you ever find the dressers you were looking for?”
“Conner told me to buy new ones. But I’m having fun hunting for bargains. It keeps me occupied while he oversees the building of the resort. Maybe I’ll drive to Boise next week and visit a few garage sales, see what I can find. You’re off Monday. Want to go with me?”
Rebecca’s call-waiting beeped before she could answer. “Hang on a sec,” she said and hit the flash button. “Hello?”
“Rebecca?”
It was her father. She sat up and shook another cigaret
te out of the package, knowing instinctively she’d need one. “Yeah?”
“I just talked to Josh Hill.”
She froze mid-motion. “Why do I get the feeling that comment is somehow related to me?”
“Because it is. I asked him to call a truce between the two of you.”
Rebecca stuck the unlit cigarette in her mouth and found her lighter. “You didn’t,” she said, speaking around it.
“I did.” A brief, unhappy hesitation. “Are you smoking again? I thought you’d quit.”
Dropping her lighter in her lap, she quickly pulled the cigarette from her mouth. “I have.”
“I hope so. That’s such a nasty habit.”
“Why did you call Josh, Dad? There’s no reason to ask for a truce.”
“After what happened at Delia’s wedding?”
“That was an accident. We haven’t done anything to each other on purpose for years.” Barring the night they’d gone to Josh’s place from the Honky Tonk, of course. They’d done a few things to each other then—and would probably have done a lot more if they hadn’t been interrupted. But that night didn’t count. Feverish groping didn’t fall in the same category as their earlier dealings.
“I’m tired of being afraid to have you two in the same room,” her father replied.
“Is that what you told him?”
“That’s what I told him.”
“And he said…” Rebecca toyed nervously with her lighter, flipping the lid open, closed, open, closed. Click, click…click, click.
“He agreed to let the past go.”
“He did?”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it? Now, what do you say?”
Click, click…click, click.
Words were cheap, Rebecca decided. Why not let her father feel as though his intervention had solved everything? “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, we’re calling a truce.”
“Good.” Her father sounded inordinately pleased. “I told him I could convince you.”
“You’ve done a bang-up job, Dad. Is that all?”
