She didn’t bother to deny it. The Exxon sign had popped into sight, and with any luck at all, this conversation had gasped its last breath.
“If you say so, sugar.”
They veered into the station as if there were an impending shortage on brake pads, and Darryl Lee was conserving. She gripped the door handle and held onto Sebbie’s collar to keep him from taking a nosedive onto the floorboard. A white Ford truck pulled away from one of the gas pumps, forcing Darryl Lee to give in and siphon off some of his brake supply. At the same time, he hit the horn, sending out another round of Dixie.
He lowered his window and waved for the driver to stop. “Hey,” he yelled, “I’ve been lookin’ for you! Pull over!”
She got a glimpse of the man in the other truck and the distinct impression that he wasn’t as happy to see Darryl Lee as Darryl Lee was to see him. Darryl Lee cut the engine and put a hand on her arm. “Can you wait a minute?”
“As a matter of fact, no,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I really need to get going.”
“Nineteen years, and you can’t wait two minutes?”
She failed to hide her astonishment. “You’re not really suggesting that I owe you something, are you?”
He glanced down at her feet, now threatening to burst free from the flimsy straps of her Italian sandals.
“Two minutes,” she conceded.
He hopped out of the truck, walked over to the Ford.
Sebbie took his place in the driver’s seat, paws planted on the windowsill, staring at the two men as if he’d been given a front row seat at a catfight.
The truck’s passenger side window lowered, and a large black and tan hound stuck its head out the window, greeting Darryl Lee with a tongue-lolling smile.
Sebbie started yipping full blast.
Grier picked him up and shushed him. To no avail. He did a happy dance on her lap, wagging his whole body at the hound, who was, of course, paying no attention to him.
The Ford’s driver got out and walked around to where Darryl Lee stood rubbing the dog’s head.
Grier tried not to stare, but curiosity got the better of her, and she squinted at the man’s face. With a start, she recognized him as Darryl Lee’s older brother, the resemblance impossible to miss.
Bobby Jack Randall. The name came instantly to her, even though she’d barely met him once when she and Darryl Lee came back to his house to watch TV, high school code for making out. Bobby Jack had been home from college for the weekend, and she remembered now the way he’d looked at her with what she’d later realized – too late, actually – was pity and even later on discovered the reason for.
If Darryl Lee looked like Bradley Cooper, Bobby Jack could pass for a slightly more serious, slightly taller version. He had the same dark hair and startling green eyes. Amazingly enough, he was even better-looking than Darryl Lee.
“You’re a rat’s ass, you know it, son?” Bobby Jack said, glancing her way with clear disapproval, his voice carrying through Darryl Lee’s rolled down window.
“Hey, man, I wish, but it’s not what you’re thinkin’,” Darryl Lee said.
“Right. I thought you and Dreama were trying to work things out.”
Darryl Lee glanced back at Grier, and she decided his two minutes were up.
“Come on, Sebbie.” She picked up his leash, opened the door and slid out, waiting for Sebbie to jump down beside her.
He did, jerking the leash from her hand and shooting across the parking lot toward the truck, the hound now barking at him in a very large hound dog bark.
Grier ran after him, her feet again screaming in the hateful heels. “Sebbie!”
“Looks like he’s got a little crush on Florence,” Darryl Lee drawled, smiling at her.
Grier’s face went three shades of red. She scooped Sebbie up and without giving either man another glance, teetered for the inside of the station.
The girl up front studied her as if Grier had fallen out of the sky. She had a tablespoon size wad of gum in her right cheek. Each time she chewed, the gum made a sharp popping sound, the art of which must have taken some practice.
“Is there anyone here who can give me a ride back to my car with some oil?” Grier asked, while Sebbie struggled into a position where he could look back at the truck over her shoulder.
“We don’t really allow no dawgs in here,” the girl said. “Bobby Jack don’t even bring his Florence in, and if anybody was allowed to bring a dawg in, it would be Bobby Jack.”
“Sebbie’s really not very much like a dog,” Grier said.
The girl narrowed her gaze at the back of Sebbie’s head. “Looks like a dawg to me. Maybe he could pass for a shrimp.” She chuckled at her own joke, then sobered with a reluctant, “You don’t look like you’re from around here.”
“My car broke down a few miles back,” Grier said. “It just needs oil.”
The girl popped her gum again, watching Grier as though she thought she might grab a pack of the Redman tobacco gracing the rack in front of her and make a run for it. She picked up the phone on the wall, punched a button and snapped out, “Marty, come to the front, please.”
She turned back to Grier then and said, “I guess we’ll make a one time exception for your . . .dawg.”
“Thank you so much,” Grier said, trying to sound grateful even as she heard the sarcasm in her voice.
Grier glanced out at the parking lot and saw the white Ford pulling away from the station, the hound’s head hanging out the window, ears flying back with the wind.
Darryl Lee headed her way. He arrived at the door at the same time as a guy dressed in grease-spotted coveralls, a bandana covering his head.
Gum Girl hitched a thumb at Grier and said, “She needs a tow, Marty.”
Marty smiled a brown-toothed smile that made Grier wonder if he’d been dipping into the store’s Redman stash. “Not a problem. Let me get the truck, and you can meet me out front.”
“Thanks,” Grier said.
Darryl Lee waited until Marty headed out the door before saying, semi-hurt, “I could’ve given you a ride back.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “Dreama’s probably expecting you somewhere.”
Darryl Lee grinned. “That jealousy I hear in your voice?”
She rolled her eyes and gave him a look that would have humbled most men. Except Darryl Lee, of course.
From the corner of her eye, she could see Gum Girl watching the two of them as if she’d just flipped the channel to a steamy soap. With Sebbie now deflated and whimpering in her arms, Grier cut short the entertainment and headed out the door to wait for Marty and the tow truck.
“Hey, whoa, now.” Darryl Lee pulled her to a stop with a hand at her elbow. “How long you gonna be in town, Grier?”
“No longer than I have to be.”
“How long’s that?”
She rounded on him then, the aggravations of this day suddenly getting the better of her. “What difference does it make to you, Darryl Lee?”
“It makes a lot of difference,” he said, his voice soft in a way she had once found completely impossible to resist. “Come on, Grier. You know it’d be good to catch up.”
“Isn’t that what we just did?”
“It was a start.”
“And a finish as far as I’m concerned.”
Marty pulled up in the tow truck, rolling down the window to call out, “You ready, ma’am?”
She nodded and signaled she’d be there in a moment. “Thanks for the help, Darryl Lee. It was good to see you,” she said, aiming for a note of graciousness and falling several decibels short.
“Can I call you while you’re here?”
“What point would there be in that?”
He dropped his gaze down the length of her, the look in his eyes answering her question. “Exactly,” she said. “You take care, Darryl Lee.”
She climbed into the truck, Sebbie hopping up to sit at her feet. She lifted her hand in a small wave.
> “You haven’t seen the last of me, Grier,” he called out as they pulled away.
She rolled up the window and forced herself not to look back.
Chapter Two
If it looks too good to be true. . .it is.
- From the Calendar-to-live-by on Bobby Jack Randall’s desk
Bobby Jack Randall wasn’t a suspicious man. But he did pay attention to the daily dollops of wisdom doled out by the desktop planner on which he kept track of his work schedule. He’d long ago learned that the man upstairs handed a guy signs along the way, and if he chose to ignore them, then he had nobody but himself to blame for the consequences.
He’d ignored enough of them in the past to qualify as an expert on the subject.
He leaned back in his chair and opened up the newspaper he hadn’t taken time to read this morning. He turned to the sports page, thinking about his brother and the hot number he’d just seen him with out at the filling station, then immediately shoved away the image. If Darryl Lee wanted to flush his marriage down the toilet with an affair, there wasn’t much he could do to stop him.
A less than pleasant odor wafted up and hit him in the nose. “Aw, Flo,” Bobby Jack said, waving the newspaper in front of his face.
The hound curled up next to his chair raised her head and looked at him with practiced innocence.
“What the heck did you get into this time?”
She dropped her chin onto her outstretched paws and sighed as if to say she was admitting to nothing.
The front door of the office burst open, bringing with it a shot of warm spring air. Bobby Jack loved this time of year and only tolerated the sometimes too-long and too-lonely Timbell Creek winters because of its eventual yielding to his favorite season.
“Daddy! You’re not going to believe this!”
The whirlwind blowing into his office was his sixteen-year-old daughter, Andersen. Andy for short. Waving a blue flyer in her right hand, she picked up his to-go cup of iced tea and took a sip, making an instant gag face. “Needs sugar,” she said.
“Ruin your own tea,” he said with amused affection. “I like mine how I like it.”
She plopped down on the floor next to Flo, rubbed the dog’s silky ears and rolled her eyes. “Even if you’re wrong?” And then to Florence, “Shoo, Flo.”
Florence didn’t even raise her head this time, content to sleep through the ridicule.
“You need to get her some probiotics, Daddy,” Andy said, waving her hand in front of her nose.
“She needs to stay out of Harvey Larson’s cow pasture.”
“In her defense, Kyle and I used to pretend to eat cow pies when we were little. . .”
“Andy,” he said quickly, cutting her short.
Andy laughed. “I did say pretend.”
Bobby Jack smiled in spite of himself. He loved to hear his daughter laugh. It was one of his favorite things in life. He adored her with a fierceness that couldn’t lay claim to a single ounce of objectivity. He figured that was how it should be since parenting sometimes required the dredging up of skills a man didn’t know he had. That love did not, however, completely blind him to his daughter’s shortcomings. Including the fact that she would argue with a fence post if she had even the remotest chance of bringing it around to her way of thinking. She’d come by that stubbornness honestly.
“What’s with the flyer?” he asked.
She put it on the desk where he could read it. He scanned it once, quickly, laughed and shook his head. “Where did you find this?”
“Mama left it on my windshield.”
“That should answer any questions you have about it right there,” he said, all the amusement evaporating from his voice.
“She thinks I ought to enter.”
“News shocker of the day,” Bobby Jack said.
Andy’s eyes narrowed, and she folded her arms across her chest. “This isn’t a hoax, Daddy. It’s true. I Googled it.”
Bobby Jack glanced at the calendar on his desk, pointed at the day’s quote to live by. “Too good to be true?”
Andy leaned forward and read it, and this time, she laughed. “You really believe those things, don’t you?”
“I have some personal experience on this particular tidbit. Your mama being exhibit number one if you’re looking for evidence.”
“Who said I was looking?”
He glanced at the flyer again.
Win a Date With a Duke!!
Auditions Held at the Mockingbird Inn
May 5th at 9 a.m.
“Andy, what on earth would you want to enter something like that for? As smart as you are, you don’t need—”
“Mama thinks it would be good for me.”
“How the heck does she figure?” His voice rose with the end of the question, the way it almost always did on any subject involving Priscilla.
“You don’t think they’d pick me, do you?”
He got up from his chair, opened a filing cabinet drawer and started sticking papers inside. “I didn’t say any such thing.”
“You’re thinking it, though,” she said, hurt threading her voice.
He turned and looked at her. “No. I’m not. It just seems—”
“Beneath me?”
“Well, yeah. Exactly.”
She waved a hand at her surroundings, her gaze sweeping the small but neat office, a desk at each wall, a row of windows on the front that looked out onto Main Street. “How could a date with a duke be beneath me?”
Bobby Jack blinked once, hard, reminded himself sixteen-year-olds said things they didn’t mean.
Florence lifted her head and studied them both.
Andy stomped to the door, yanked it open, then swung back around.
“You like that I’m not as pretty as Mama, don’t you? That way you can be sure I’ll hang around a little longer than she did.”
Bobby Jack stood silent while she slammed the door behind her. He heard the Ford truck he’d given her on her sixteenth birthday roar to life, tires squealing once as she popped the clutch and peeled out of the parking place.
He sat down in his chair, picked up his iced tea and then tossed it in the trashcan. He’d be getting Dad-of-the-year for this one.
Florence put her head back on her paws and sighed as if she agreed with him.
The door opened again, and Alice Marshall bustled in from her lunch hour, carrying a pocketbook as big as a mail sack. Alice was nearly as wide as she was tall. Thanks to a monthly dose of Miss Clairol, her hair had remained nearly the same bright red in the past three decades of her life as it had the first three. She had a deep dimple on either cheek and green eyes that could bathe a person in approval or dress them down with equal effectiveness.
“Was that Andy I saw tearing off down the street?” she asked, her voice cracking under the remains of a cold.
“Yeah,” Bobby Jack said, unable to keep the defeat from his response. He crossed the office and helped her unload, placing her things on her desk.
“Hey, now,” Alice said, patting his shoulder with a hand arthritis was starting to get the better of. “They don’t know what they’re saying at that age. Their brain’s been temporarily taken hostage by hormones.”
“Isn’t there something a doctor can prescribe for that?”
Alice laughed, picking up her purse and putting it behind her desk, then walking over to give Florence a pat on the head. “If there was, I don’t know a parent who wouldn’t be lining up at Doc Barker’s door. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things you just have to swim through to get to the other side.”
Bobby Jack sat down at his own desk, leaned back with his hands laced behind his head. “Why can’t they stay like they were when they were ten? Before all the puberty crap? At ten, you can have an honest conversation with them, and yet they still look at you like you might know a thing or two.”
Alice lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “That, you’ll have to ask the man upstairs. So what was the upset between you, anyway?”
“She wants to enter some ridiculous contest to win a date with a duke.”
Alice raised penciled-in eyebrows. “Really, now?”
“Like there’s even a remote possibility the thing is on the up and up.”
“And? What’s the worst that can happen if it’s not?”
He considered this, then shook his head. “She’ll end up feeling foolish.”
“So let her.”
“Let her?” Bobby Jack shot back. “What kind of advice is that?”
“The only kind that’s going to get you out of the dog house.”
“If it keeps her from making a mistake, I’m willing to stay there a while.”
“Bobby Jack. You’ve got to let that girl start making some of her own mistakes. For the child’s whole life, you’ve been throwing yourself in front of her every time she gets ready to fall. How’s she ever going to learn what it’s like to have to pick herself back up when you’re no longer there to act as a mattress?”
“You got plans for her to go somewhere or something?”
“The last I checked you’re as human as the rest of us. At some point, you have to let them grow up, Bobby Jack.”
He glanced out the window, saw Priscilla’s banana yellow Corvette pull into a parking space across the street. “Yeah, maybe. But first there’s something else I’ve got to do.”
Florence at his heels, he stepped outside of the office onto the sidewalk, then jaywalked in front of Pete Thompson’s old clunker farm use truck. Pete, almost as ancient in appearance as the truck itself, shook a finger out his rolled down window and honked the horn.
Bobby Jack just smiled and waved, as if he couldn’t hear Pete’s grumbling through the lowered window.
Most days, Bobby Jack went to great lengths to avoid run-ins with his ex-wife, succeeding largely even though their respective businesses were right across the street from one another. When she’d sailed back into town a few years ago and opened up her Well-Kept Woman Day Spa and Salon right across the street from him, he’d considered moving. But he liked his office. As a matter of principle, if anyone moved, it should be Priscilla.
In the parking lot, he stopped just short of her car, shoving his hands in his pockets to keep from giving in to the temptation to strangle her.
Crossing Tinker's Knob Page 30
