Clarice laid a hand over her heart, and the color left her cheeks.
“Marvin,” she whispered.
“Marvin Cooper?” Dotty set a tray holding three cups of coffee on the coffee table. “I’ll be damned. Did you tell her that you were playing kickball with a damned old dead mouse?”
“No, ma’am.” Emily’s nostrils curled just thinking about it. She looked down at her boots. Should she simply leave them in her hotel room or try to wash the mouse from them? She could visualize the thing right there on the instep.
“Well, it took half a bar of soap to get it off my hand.” Dotty went on to tell Clarice the story. “She don’t like mice either, so I’ve decided that she’s my new friend.”
Clarice giggled. “I wish I’d been here to see that sight. Dotty hates mice and I hate spiders.” She ran a hand down the side of the box, but she didn’t take it. “I can’t believe he kept them all these years or that you’ve brought them to me.”
Emily pointed to the one that had been slipped beneath the faded red ribbon tied around the box. “This one is from him to you. It got stuck in a mailbag and then the bag got shoved back into an old desk drawer down at the post office. They didn’t discover it until last week. According to the postmark, it should’ve been mailed sixty years ago, but it never left Happy. You might want to start with it. They brought it out to the ranch and apologized for losing it all those years ago. Gramps told me to put it with the others, and he didn’t even open it. He said he remembered right well what it said.”
Clarice’s hands trembled. “Gramps? That would make you his granddaughter, then? He got married and had children?”
“Yes, he did and he is—was—my grandfather. He’s only been gone four days and I’m still not used to the idea of saying ‘was.’ It sounds so final.”
“I understand. When my husband died, it took me a long time to use the past tense too. So Marvin had a granddaughter and I have a grandson,” Clarice whispered.
Dotty shook her head slowly. “Marvin Cooper! When I first met Clarice she told me all about Marvin, but we never thought we’d hear that name again. And you drove all the way across the state to bring those letters? You are talking about Happy, Texas, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You aren’t plannin’ on drivin’ all the way back tonight, are you?” Clarice asked.
“I’m staying at a hotel in Sherman,” Emily said.
“Please stay with us for supper. I’ve got to hear all about Marvin and how his life went.” Clarice’s eyes misted over and Emily couldn’t have refused her request if it had meant standing in front of a firing squad.
Besides, it was just supper and a couple of hours’ worth of talking about her grandfather. It would make Clarice feel good, and Gramps would like that. Maybe it would even give Emily the closure she needed so badly.
“And if that damned old mama cat brings up another rat, we might have to stick together to get rid of it,” Dotty said.
“Thank you. I’d like to stay for supper, but Miz Dotty, if that cat brings up another one of those vicious rats, you’re on your own,” Emily said.
“Rat, my hind end. It was probably just a baby mouse. Every time that Dotty tells the story it’ll get bigger and bigger,” Clarice said.
“You didn’t see it. It was only slightly smaller than a damned old ’possum,” Dotty argued.
Emily giggled and wished that she could take Dotty to Florida with her. That old girl would be a real hoot to have around all the time.
Clarice’s phone rang and she fished it out of her shirt pocket. “Greg, darlin’, the most amazing thing has happened.” She gave him the one-minute shortened form of Emily bringing the box of letters and told him that she’d tell him the rest of the story when he got home.
Emily looked at the blaze in the fireplace, at the ceiling, and finally settled back on the picture of Clarice’s grandson. She locked gazes with him, wondering what he would be like in the flesh. Was he really that handsome or just very, very photogenic?
“That’s her grandson, Greg,” Dotty whispered.
“She told me.” Emily nodded.
“He’s gone right now, but he’ll be home tomorrow night. We miss him,” Dotty said.
“I bet he misses being home,” Emily said.
“Emily,” Clarice said.
She whipped around when she heard her name, and an instant flash lit up her face.
Clarice giggled like a little girl. “I’m so sorry. He asked me what your name was again and I told him. It’s a good picture of you. You have your grandpa’s eyes. This is a new phone and I keep taking pictures of things rather than hanging up. I miss the old corded phones that we used to have and cameras that used a flashbulb. This new technology is enough to drive a person crazy.”
Dotty picked up her cup of coffee and sipped at it. “Ain’t that the truth. Us old dogs havin’ to learn all these new tricks is frustratin’ as hell, and that damned computer shit is the worst thing of all. Y’all best drink that coffee before it gets cold. Want some cookies to go with it? It’s a while till supper.”
“No, this is fine.” Emily covered a yawn with her hand. “I’m sorry. I drove all day, stopped at the hotel, and then got lost twice trying to find this place.”
“How did you find me?” Clarice asked.
“I stopped at the post office and the lady there said that there wasn’t a Clarice Barton around. The only Clarice she knew was Clarice Adams and I might check to see if that was you.”
“She’s new in town. Ain’t been here but ten years or she would have known the Bartons helped to build Ravenna.” Dotty pointed to the door. “I know Clarice is just dyin’ to dig into those letters. And I’ve got things to do in the kitchen. Would you like to take a nap until suppertime? You can rest in the first room on the left upstairs.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a bother,” Emily said.
“No bother at all. You go on up there and rest. If you aren’t awake by supper, I’ll holler for you,” Dotty said.
Clarice reached across the space separating them and patted her arm. “And thank you so much for bringing these letters.”
“I promised Gramps I would do it. Is it all right if I take this upstairs with me?” Emily picked up her cup of coffee.
“Of course it is,” Clarice said.
Dotty stood up at the same time Emily did. “Clarice was right about Marvin. She said that she thought he was about to ask her to marry him. She’s the only one of us four that isn’t a mail-order bride. That’s the way I come to live in these parts. I was from Kentucky and he lived here. I thought any place was better than Harlan County, Kentucky, so I climbed on a bus and come out here. Married Johnny and loved him to his dying day, but the best thing that come out of me bein’ a mail-order bride is that I met Clarice and we become best friends.”
“Four of you?”
“Yep.” Dotty nodded. “Me and Rose and Madge all come to Texas right after the war was over more than sixty years ago. I got here first in January and the other two came on later that spring. It’s a long story how it all happened. Rose and Madge are cousins. Madge was writing to a soldier that she met through the church pen pal group. So she came out here to meet him, and then Rose came to visit and wound up married to a local guy too. Our husbands are all gone now and we are widows.”
“You were all kind of like mail-order brides?”
“Mainly me and Madge were, and Rose kind of got in on the deal like shirttail kin. Clarice is the only one of us that was raised right here in Ravenna,” Dotty said. “Now get on up there and get some rest.”
“Supper is at six?” Emily checked the clock and glanced at that picture one more time.
“Yes, it is.” Dotty smiled.
A two-hour nap, supper, some talk about her grandfather, and then back to the hotel
. Tomorrow she would be on her way to Florida for a whole month on the beach.
“Oh, my!” Emily gasped when she opened the door into the bedroom.
Back when she was in high school she would have hocked her tomcat, Spurs, to have her own room like the one before her. A queen-sized four-poster bed covered with a pretty quilt and lacy bed ruffle sat on one side of the room. A big, deep recliner and a vanity with a three-way mirror were located over beside the door into the bathroom, which sported a deep claw-footed tub. She’d always shared the one bathroom in the small three-bedroom ranch house with two men who did not understand why one girl needed so much hairspray, lotion, bath oil, and her own pink razors to shave her legs.
She washed her hands, dried them, and then rubbed lotion into them—sweet-smelling lavender lotion that reminded her of Great-Aunt Molly, grandmother to her favorite cousin, Taylor.
Her grandfather’s words the day that he and Molly went to the courthouse together came back to her as she looked in the bathroom mirror. Molly had deeded her ranch to Taylor, and Marvin had given what was left of his adjoining ranch to Emily. On the way home he had said, “I’m not real sure your future is on Shine Canyon Ranch, Em.”
When she’d asked him why he’d say a thing like that, he’d just smiled and tapped his heart. “Ranchin’ is in your heart and you’ll always love it, but something in my soul tells me your future is not on Shine Canyon. When I’m gone, I want you to take a month and think things through before you commit to this land for the rest of your life. You’ll have a hard row to hoe even with family to help with just a hundred acres. I’m not sure in today’s economy that you’ll ever make it without taking a job in town, and that means ranchin’ at night after you work your ass off all day at your job.”
She blinked away the tears and turned away from the mirror. “A hundred acres might not be much, but it’s mine, Gramps. And I love the land as much as you did. I’m not afraid of hard work, and piece by piece I’ll buy our land back from Taylor. He promised he’d sell it to me when I could buy it, remember. That was the rule when you sold it to him.”
Lacy curtains covered the narrow window overlooking the backyard. She drew a corner back and peeked out. She dropped the curtain and took a step back, stumbled over a small footstool, and went down on one knee.
She wanted to cry, to curl up in a ball and weep, but she couldn’t. She limped over to the recliner, flipped the handle on the side, and leaned back as far as it would let her, looked up, and right there on top of the chest of drawers was another picture of Greg. A bust shot of him in his high school graduation robe and mortarboard hat with a tassel hanging to the side. The gold charm told her that he’d graduated two years before she did and that his school colors were orange and black. A sticky note attached to the side of the frame held the message, “I’ll bring home the best bull. Miss you!”
He was younger, but the eyes were the same and they still looked right into her soul like the picture down in the living room. She threw her arm over her face and forced herself to think about the beach, to hear the seagulls and the slapping of the waves against the sandbar. The soft smell of the lotion on her hands sparked a deep memory of her mother in her dreams. They were playing in the wildflowers like the ones in the picture of Greg Adams. She was a little girl with dark braids and a cotton dress. The grass was soft on her bare feet but cool, so it had to be spring. They’d sung the “Ring around the Rosy” song, then fallen back in the flowers. Her mother touched her cheek and said, “Don’t ever give up your wings. Always know that you can fly, my child.”
Then out of nowhere there was a door right in the middle of the pasture of wild colorful flowers, and there was a yellow cat peeking around the corner. A mouse darted through the cat’s front legs and was coming right at her when she sat straight up in bed and her eyes popped wide open.
“Damn it! I don’t get to dream about Mama very often. Why’d you bring that thing into my dreams?” she asked.
Someone rapped gently on the door, but she thought it was part of the dream until it happened again. She cocked her head to one side and said, “Come in.”
Clarice pushed inside and sat down on the vanity bench. “Thank you. It’s been more than an hour and I was hoping you were awake. Would you please tell me more about Marvin? I read the letter and it said what I thought it would. Strange, that something sixty years old can still be so bittersweet.”
“Is it all right if I sit on the bed?” Emily asked. “This chair would be a lot more comfortable for you than that bench.”
“Honey, this is your room right now. Make yourself at home.”
“Is that your grandson in that picture too?” Emily asked.
Clarice nodded. “When he graduated from high school. He leaves me little notes when he has to be gone. It’s to convince me that he’s coming back. I have a fear that he’ll change his mind about ranchin’. Now please tell me about Marvin.”
Emily kicked off her boots and crawled up in the middle of the bed. She crossed her legs Indian-style, kept her gaze on Clarice and off the picture on the chest, and said, “He fought cancer for five years and last week the battle ended. It won. I thought he’d kick it for sure right up until that last week. He was diagnosed the week I graduated from college five years ago. I had planned on coming back to the ranch anyway, so it didn’t change my life drastically. I took care of him. He was always too stubborn to hire a foreman, so I took care of that too. As the ranch dwindled to pay for his bills, there was less ranchin’ and more caretakin’.”
“How many children did he have?” Clarice asked.
Emily held up one finger. “Just one son, my father. But Nana’s family lived on the next farm over. She came from a family that had five girls, so I had lots of family around me and lots of cousins to play with when I was growing up. My father died nine years ago in a horse accident. I was a senior in high school and the shock was horrible. Even worse than when Mama died, but I was just barely four that year and too little to really understand what an aneurism was. He was fine that morning at breakfast and that evening he was gone. I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever endure, but watching Gramps go by degrees was even tougher. How many children did you have, Miz Clarice?”
“Just one son, Bart. He and his wife, Nancy, only had one child—Greg. He’s thirty now. And you?”
“Twenty-eight,” Emily answered.
“Did Marvin ever mention me?” Clarice asked softly.
“He talked about you that last week and to you the last hours of his life. I really thought that you were probably dead and had come to help him cross over into eternity. He made me promise that I’d find out if you were alive and see to it that you got those letters and understood that he hadn’t been a jackass. It all started when the mailman drove out to the ranch with that letter they found at the post office,” Emily said.
“Thank you for keeping that promise. You’ll never know what this means to me. Did Marvin, was he, did he suffer?” Clarice dabbed at her eye.
Emily shook her head. “He was sick for a very long time, but there at the first he was still able to be up and around. It wasn’t until that last round of chemo that he wasn’t able to at least sit on the porch swing with me every evening. At the end I prayed that God would take him on to a place where he wouldn’t hurt anymore. That sounds ugly, doesn’t it?”
Clarice shook her head. “No, it’s the way life is. Why didn’t he come to Ravenna all those years ago? He knew where I was.”
Emily shrugged. “I asked him that, but he just smiled and said that God must’ve had other plans for both of you or that letter wouldn’t have gotten lost.”
Clarice nodded. “Can’t undo history. I was happy with Lester Adams. We had a good life, raised a good son, and he married well. Now I have Greg to help me run the ranch. I’m glad you brought the letters home to me, Emily, and I’m glad you agreed to st
ay for supper.”
“Thank you,” Emily said.
“Want to come with me to the kitchen and help Dotty get things on the table?” Clarice asked.
“I’d love to.” Emily bounded off the bed, stomped her feet back into her boots, and followed Clarice on do
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About the Author
Carolyn Brown is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author with more than sixty books published, and credits her eclectic family for her humor and writing ideas. Her books include the cowboy trilogy Lucky in Love, One Lucky Cowboy, and Getting Lucky; the Honky Tonk series with I Love This Bar; Hell, Yeah; Honky Tonk Christmas; and My Give a Damn’s Busted; and her bestselling Spikes & Spurs series with Love Drunk Cowboy, Red’s Hot Cowboy, Darn Good Cowboy Christmas, One Hot Cowboy Wedding, Mistletoe Cowboy, Just a Cowboy and His Baby, and Cowboy Seeks Bride. Carolyn has launched into women’s fiction as well with The Blue-Ribbon Jalapeño Society Jubilee. She was born in Texas but grew up in southern Oklahoma where she and her husband, Charles, a retired English teacher, make their home. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young.
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