Practically Married

by Christine Rimmer

  Jobeth was frowning. “Mom? What’s the matter?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “We were talking. I was explaining to you how I have to miss school tomorrow and you just...stopped listening.”

  Tess pushed the nagging worry about her relationship with Zach out of her mind. “I apologize for woolgathering.”

  Jobeth pulled a face. “Woolgathering?”

  “That’s another word for not listening, for letting your mind wander.”

  “Oh.”

  “But whether I was woolgathering or not, you are not missing school. Not this time.”

  Jobeth moaned—and then fastened on the part of her mother’s statement that she liked. “But later. When I know more. When Zach and the other guys can’t get along without me. I just might have to miss some school then, right?”

  Tess ran a finger down the center of her daughter’s forehead, tracing the natural line where her bangs tended to part. “Yes. I imagine so.”

  Jobeth heaved a sigh. “It’s better than nothing, I guess.”

  Zach went out again after dinner, and didn’t return until after nine. Tess, in the great room with her gardening book open on her lap, heard the pickup drive in. He must have hung around the barn and sheds for a while, because it was a half an hour later when she heard him come through the back door.

  Tess closed her book, marking her place with the scrap of paper on which she’d been scribbling possible garden layouts. From the sofa where she sat, she could see the central hall and the foot of the stairs. She waited, watching.

  Sure enough, Zach appeared in his stocking feet, headed for the stairs.

  “Zach?” She stood.

  He stopped with one heavy wool sock on the first step, and looked at her through the arch that separated the two rooms. She moved toward him, carrying her book, and stopped inside the hall arch, about five feet from where he waited to see what she wanted.

  She tried a smile. “Muddy boots, huh?”

  He shrugged. “I left them by the back door.”

  “Best place for them.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” He waited, his hand on the banister, ready to get out of there as soon as she told him why she’d stopped him.

  The stranger I married, she thought with more self-pity than she should have allowed herself.

  But then he actually smiled and gestured at the book she held. “Planning your garden, huh?”

  She returned his smile. “I should have done this in January or February. The planning, I mean. Well, I did plan in January. But for the garden at Edna’s. And that was different. Smaller, for one thing. And then, the windbreak, with the fence and the surrounding houses and all, was so much more effective than I’m going to get here at the ranch....” She realized she was babbling and cut herself short. “Anyway, I’ll work it out.”

  “I know you will.” He looked at her for a long moment. It seemed a warm look. But how could she know for sure? Then he shook himself and glanced down at the mud that spattered his jeans and shirt. “I’m a mess. Gotta go.” He started to move.

  “Wait.”

  He stopped.

  She rushed on, before he could leave her. “Tomorrow will be a branding day. Is that right?”

  “You bet.”

  “In the North Pasture?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not sure where that is exactly. I wonder...could you draw me a map?”

  He frowned. “A map.”

  “Could I get my Tercel out there, do you think? It’s got four-wheel drive.”

  “Sure, you could. But I don’t—”

  “Then after I make certain Jobeth catches the bus, I thought I’d load up some food and come join you.”

  He said nothing for a moment. Then he told her gently, “You don’t have to do that. If you’ll just pack us up something we can take along, that would be more than—”

  “Zach.”

  “What?”

  “I want to do it.”

  He stared at her, looking wary and maybe a little hopeful, too.

  For the first time since that brief, shared glance at the breakfast table that morning, she felt warmly toward him. “Zach. You never know. I might even pitch in. I’ve been in on my share of brandings, in case I didn’t mention it.”

  He seemed bemused. “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “All right. We can always use an extra hand.”

  Since Sonny’s wife, Farrah, had come along to do the tally of the calves they branded and to handle the vaccine gun, they let Tess work the crowding pen with Sonny and Lolly. It was the dirtiest, toughest job of the branding process, during which they not only branded the calves, but also vaccinated them and castrated the males. Between them, Tess and the others chased and shoved and wrestled the penned calves into the calf table, a special working chute that could be rotated sideways, laying the calf in position to take the brand.

  Tess proved herself proficient at the job—and then, when they switched positions for a while, she got to take Beau Tisdale’s place and hold a few hind legs. Hind leg holding could be quite challenging. You had to hold tight, or the one doing the castrating could get cut or kicked. And with all the stress the calves endured under the iron and the knife, they tended to be incontinent. So the hind leg holder got to hold tight—and dodge flying streams of manure at the same time.

  Still, branding was its own kind of fun, with everybody working hard as a team to get the job done.

  They took a beer break at nine. To them, after all, it was the middle of the day. And they stopped for lunch at eleven, with only about fifteen calves to go. Tess realized they were stopping for her sake, since she’d brought the food out there. They could have just finished up and ridden on home to eat.

  But whether lunch out in the pasture was necessary or not, it was fun. Everyone said it made scrabbling around in the dust, manhandling cattle almost worth it, for a hot meal like this one.

  “Where’s Meggie?” Zach asked, between bites. “I can’t believe she’d let a branding go by without at least showing up to see that we’re doing things right.”

  “She’s home,” Nate said, somewhat grimly. “She was up half the night. with Jace. I told her she was spending her day catching up on her rest.”

  Farrah laughed. “You know how she is. She kept insisting I should stay with Jace and Davy.” Davy was Farrah’s three-year-old. “Meggie swore she’d take it easy, if Nate would just let her come, that she’d handle the tally and the vaccine guns.”

  Nate added, “I said she’d take it easy, all right. In bed. Period.”

  Farrah chuckled some more. “Nate practically had to tie her up to get her to change her mind.”

  “Tell her we missed her,” Zach said.

  Nate snorted. “As if that’ll make her feel better. You know how she is. She’s not going to be happy until she’s back on that bay mare of hers, running the rest of us ragged.”

  Zach was grinning. “Well, we’ve got several more days of this, between your place and the Rising Sun. You think you’ll keep her home through all of it?”

  “I’ll keep her home,” Nate said darkly. “If I have to lock her in the bedroom.”

  Zach kept on grinning. “She’ll climb out the window.”

  Nate was not amused. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”

  Tess watched the interplay between the cousins, thinking how handsome Zach really was—in a rugged, no-frills sort of way, with his sun-toughened skin, strong cheekbones and hawklike nose.

  But then again, maybe he did have a frill or two. If you looked close. He’d taken off his hat and his thick brown hair shone golden in the sun. And there was a dimple in his chin—a cleft, Tess mentally corrected herself. Men didn’t have dimples, they had clefts. And then he had such a nice mouth, as all the Bravos did. Kind of full for a man. A mouth that made a woman think about kissing it.

  Strange. All those months they’d been seeing each other, she’d never thought much about Za
ch’s mouth, let alone about kissing Zach’s mouth. Truth to tell, because of her feelings for Cash, she’d tried not to think about kissing Zach. It had just been something she knew would happen someday, if things kept on between them. She supposed she had looked at it as kind of a necessity. He would kiss her. They would make love. And maybe they’d have children—which she saw as the real goal.

  But now, the goal was...postponed, to say the least.

  And here she was, watching him razz his cousin out in the North Pasture, and thinking about kissing him just for kissing’s sake alone.

  As if he could feel her watching, Zach started to turn. Tess saw his head move and managed to look out across the pasture before he actually caught her looking. And then she felt foolish, for turning away. She might have simply smiled at him.

  And he might have smiled in return.

  Tess decided to head back to the house before the others. She had some washing to do, and she wanted to get the dinner under way. And then, once Jobeth got home, they would drive into town to the garden shop, where Tess would buy the equipment she needed, along with a few flats of seedlings to get things going.

  The others were already back at the corral when she got in the car to go, but Zach broke away and came running over. He skimmed off his hat and leaned in her window. “Hey. That was good. Thanks.”

  She couldn’t help teasing, “The food, you mean—or the great hand I’ve got with a hind leg?”

  “Both.” He gripped the ledge of her open window and looked down at the Tercel. “How did you manage to get out here in this thing?”

  “It was iffy going, now and then. But I made it, as you can see.”

  His brows drew together. “How long have you had this car?”

  She laughed. “Too long.”

  He stepped back. “Well. The rest of us should be home soon.”

  “Fine. After Jobeth gets back from school, I’m going to town to the garden shop. So if you get in later than you expect, and I’m not there—”

  “I understand. You’ll need money.”

  She hadn’t even thought of that. She had a little money of her own and had expected to spend some of it. “No, really, I—”

  “In my room. There’s a money clip. Top dresser drawer, in back. You’ll find several hundred in cash there, for emergencies. Hell. I didn’t even think about this. You have any credit cards?”

  She shook her head, the old shame rising. She’d been Josh DeMarley’s wife, after all. They’d lived hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck. Once, during the first years of their marriage, they’d had a few credit cards. Josh had run them past their limits and then, about five years ago, he’d ended up declaring bankruptcy. After that, no credit card company in the world would have been crazy enough to extend credit to them.

  Zach went on, “I’ll see about getting you a card on my Visa account, at least. And in the next week or two, we’ll have to go in to the bank and put you on my checking account.”

  “I have a checking account.”

  He smiled. “Don’t get prickly. We never discussed this money thing, and we should have. You need to get on my account. So you have access to my money, when you need it.”

  “I do not need access to your money.”

  “Tess.” He said her name gently, carefully. “You’re my wife.”

  She almost said it: No, I’m not. Not really. Not completely your wife. But somehow she held it back. She slid her hands up to twelve and then back out to ten and two on the steering wheel. “I want to get going. And you’re needed at the corral.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Right.” He backed away from the door. “Well, see you at the house, then.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  He stuck his hat back on his head and then stood there, watching, as she shifted into gear and drove off.

  Once he was behind her, she caught sight of him in her rearview mirror. He was still standing there, staring after her. Finally he seemed to shake himself. He turned to join the others.

  Tess focused front again, and came up to the gate. She stopped to open it, her mind stuck, for some silly reason, on the image of him standing there, staring after her.

  He had seemed a little lost, a little unsure.

  As if he didn’t quite know how to deal with her.

  And he probably didn’t, she thought, as she got back in the car, drove through the gate, and then stopped again to close it behind her. Really, for all their caution with each other, they had kind of jumped into the marriage when it finally came down to it. Between the proposal and the wedding there had been exactly six days. They’d never even taken the time to talk about things like money. Or sex.

  Or secrets.

  She slid behind the wheel again and shifted into gear. The car started down the rutted dirt road.

  Secrets. Well, Zach was never going to know her secrets. And that would make it all the harder for them to become close.

  Theirs was simply not your average marriage—which had to be just as confusing for him as it was for her.

  Too often, he did seem like a stranger. Still, for all the distance he kept between them, he was a good man who treated her with courtesy and kindness. With the exception of his body, he seemed willing to share all he had with her.

  And yet, in spite of his courtesy and kindness, she had felt bitterness toward him. She’d felt it more than once in the brief time since their wedding night. Bitterness was a danger. Bitterness could kill any chance of closeness before it could even be born. She knew that from hard experience.

  Tess bumped over a particularly bad rut. The car bottomed out, the pan scratching along the ridge of the rut, the transmission letting out an ugly groaning sound as she shifted down from second to first. She willed the old car to keep going, to please just get her home.

  And she vowed, no more bitterness. No more bad attitudes. No more self-pity. She would be Zach’s wife on his terms, and have some faith that they’d truly find their way to each other in the end.

  Chapter Six

  Three days later, in the afternoon, Zach took Tess into town. They visited the bank and his insurance agent. Before they went home, Tess and Zach had a joint checking account, Tess had signed on for a Visa card and she and Jobeth had full health coverage.

  Then, when Saturday rolled around, Tess found herself in the cab of the blue Chevy pickup on the way to Sheridan with her daughter and her husband. When they came back that evening, Zach and Jobeth were still in the pickup—but Tess was driving a brand-new Suburban, a roomy 4X4 station wagon on a pickup chassis.

  “Oh, Zach, it’s too much,” Tess had protested when she saw the Suburban for the first time, so big and shiny and new on display in the car lot. “You can’t—”

  He cut her off in his firmest voice. “I can. And you need it. That Tercel was a great little car—at one time. But for your purposes now it’s too old, too small and way too close to the ground.”

  When it came time to deal with all the paperwork, Zach wrote an enormous check, paying half in cash—to cut down on the interest, he said. After that, he signed loan forms for the balance. Then he handed the pen to Tess.

  She stared at him, not understanding.

  He pointed at the next form. “So the registration will be in your name.”

  She thought again of how much the car cost. “Oh, that’s not necessary. Truly, I—”

  Zach took her hand and wrapped it around the pen. “Sign. Right there on that line.”

  His touch, so warm and rough and sure, shocked her to her toes. Since he touched her so seldom, each slightest physical contact had started to take on great importance.

  “Sign, Tess.”

  Rather numbly, she did.

  After that, they went out to dinner. Then Tess drove her new Suburban back to the Rising Sun, loving the steady purr of the engine, smelling that incredible new-car smell, and swearing to herself that she would work her fingers to the bone to do what she could in return for all that Zach had given her.<
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  That night, after she put Jobeth to bed, Tess sat in the great room sewing patches onto the knees of a pair of Jobeth’s jeans. Soon enough, she heard Zach come in through the back door from his final rounds of the barn and sheds. She knew his routine, and went on with her mending, hardly listening for the sound of his footfalls. He might pause in the kitchen, to drink a glass of water at the sink. But after that, he would go straight for the stairs and head up to his room. He always did.

  Or at least, in the week since their wedding, he always had.

  But this time, he didn’t turn for the stairs. Tess almost poked her finger with her needle when she realized he was headed her way. He stopped just outside the room where she sat. She kept her head bent over the mending, but still, she could feel him there, in the arch to the hall.

  “Always busy.”

  She realized she’d been holding her breath and let it out slowly, so he wouldn’t know. Then she looked up and met his eyes. They shared a smile. She held up her mending. “Jobeth. She swears she doesn’t walk around on her knees, but you couldn’t prove it by me.”

  He laughed, a warm, friendly sound. Her heart felt featherlight.

  “Listen, I...” His sentence died without ever really getting started.

  She wanted to urge him to fully enter the room, to sit down, to talk to her. But she didn’t want to push, either. If he wanted to come in, he would.

  He moved forward. One step. And then another, until he stood over her. “I wanted to talk to you a little about Jobeth.”

  She nodded, very casually, and kind of tipped her head toward the sofa, in an invitation that he could accept or reject without saying a word. He did neither. That is, he didn’t sit. But he didn’t leave, either.

  He strode to the woodstove over by the interior wall, knelt, opened the side door and stirred the coals with the poker. Then he added a couple of logs from the wood box nearby. She watched him, admiring the strong breadth of his back and the way it tapered down to his narrow, hard waist.