by Lisa Wingate
Sydney shrugged and crossed her arms, not happy because I wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear. “Can we keep the dog, at least?”
“We already talked about that.” I’d had just about enough of the snotty cold shoulder. “Mr. Grits is an outside dog. He wouldn’t be happy in an apartment. We may get some kind of a little dog, but we’re going to drop Mr. Grits at the Hawthorne House on our way through San Saline. The lady there finds homes for lost dogs.” Mr. Grits stuck his head between the seats at the word dog, and I stroked his fur. It was soft and supple after his swim in the river last night.
I hoped I could say good-bye to him without crying. If I cried, it would really set Sydney off about keeping him. I had to do what was best, and he belonged here, chasing goldfish and terrorizing jackrabbits.
Twisting sideways, Sydney sat picking at a loose piece of rubber by the window. We rode in silence as mile after mile flashed by, taking us away from the Jubilee Ranch, through the town of Loveland, where the Big Lizard Diner was full today, past the Over the Moon, where the OUT TO LUNCH sign was already on the door and Melvin’s secret dinosaur bone lay hidden in the closet, past the tiny post office and the wedding chapel, and the Lover’s Oak, where I kissed Zach Truitt while the Blum sisters looked on.
I didn’t stop to read the sign one last time, or look at the tree, which I now knew was Caroline Truitt’s final marker, her encouragement to others to look up and out.
Gripping the steering wheel, I turned to face forward and stared straight ahead, trying not to think about her words.
What if this is my one chance …
I didn’t have Caroline’s kind of courage. I couldn’t take this chance. The risks were too great. I had a child to think about.
Sydney turned toward me as we sped along the open road. “I’m hungry. Can we get something to eat?”
I checked the clock. “It’s almost lunchtime. Tell you what. Let’s pull through the Dairy Queen in San Saline and grab some hamburgers. We can feed one to Mr. Grits before we take him by the Hawthorne House. He’s a cheeseburger fan.”
The idea seemed to cheer Sydney. Sitting up on her knees, she searched for San Saline, until finally it materialized on the horizon ahead.
When we reached the Dairy Queen, there wasn’t a single customer inside, no cars in the parking lot, not even a worker’s car around back.
“We may be out of luck,” I told Sydney as we pulled up to the window. The bell made a ding, ding, and a waitress appeared, gesticulating wildly to someone out of view as she walked backward from the kitchen.
Through the partially opened glass, I could hear her as she came closer. “ … carjacking the next thing that comes through here, I swear to God. Mama Hawthorne’s gonna kill me if I miss the wedding lunch.” She turned around, and I realized it was Becky. Great.
Throwing open the slider, she leaned out, breathless and wide-eyed. “You have to help… .” Taking on a look of recognition, she slapped a hand to her chest. “Oh, thank God. I know you. I’m so glad you came along.”
“We’d like to ord—”
She fanned her hands back and forth in the air urgently, cutting me off. “No, no, wait. Listen. You have to give me a ride. Jimmy’s folks are renewing their vows today, and the prewedding lunch starts in ten minutes. Everyone in town’s already gone, and that stupid new truck of Jimmy’s is broke down at the grocery store. Charlie”—she pointed to Charlie, who had come out from behind the fry grill—“rode here on a ten-speed bicycle. I’m so desperate I’d probably even try that, but I can’t ride six miles in ten minutes, and it’s all uphill anyway. I was just praying somebody would come along, and here you are. Thank God.”
The barrage of words made it impossible to think, but I did realize one thing. She was talking about a wedding, a renewal of vows. Collie, Laura, Pop, and Jocelyn had all gone to a wedding. Zach had gone to a wedding. If I went there, I would have to face all the people I was running away from.
“I’m sorry but we’re headed out of …” I paused, looking into Becky’s desperate face. There was no way I could leave her standing there without a ride. I’d have to drive her wherever she needed to go. Hopefully I could drop her at the door and leave before anyone saw me.
“Please.” Becky grabbed my arm. “Listen, I’m sorry about the other day. I was in a snotty mood, and I shouldn’t of said things about Zach’s ex. Jimmy was mad at me afterward. I do stuff like that sometimes, and I don’t even mean to. Mama Hawthorne says I’ve got a mouth on me, and I like to stir up trouble. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t of said anything.”
“No, I’m glad you did.” In her own weird way, Becky had helped save me from a disaster of my own making. “Hop in. We’ll give you a ride.”
Less than sixty seconds later, we were headed out of town with Sydney and the dog in the back, and Becky in the passenger seat, working on an in-transit change from her Dairy Queen uniform to a skirt and high heels.
“Listen, I hope I didn’t start up a problem between you and Zach,” she said, panting as she tried to pull on a pair of panty hose.
“You didn’t,” I replied flatly, glancing in the rearview mirror at Sydney, who was listening to a CD with her earphones, while watching the crazy lady half-naked in our passenger seat.
Becky went on talking. “Because I heard that the Blum sisters saw you two kissing under the Lover’s Oak.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said to cut her off. I didn’t want to talk about it, especially not with Zach’s ex-sister-in-law.
Becky paused to check where we were. “Turn left here. We’ll take the shortcut.”
“All right.” I made the turn, then stepped on the accelerator, hoping to get the ride over with as soon as possible. “How far?”
“Two or three miles this way.” Becky pointed ahead. “Turn in that gateway—there with the cattle guard. Just keep going all the way through. We’ll come out almost where we need to be.”
“Got it.” Squealing around the corner, we rocketed onto a rough gravel road while Becky tumbled around, struggling with the panty hose like a magician in a straitjacket. “I’ll have you to the church in a jiffy. You just worry about getting dressed.”
I hoped that would shut her up and end the conversation about Zach, but, of course, it didn’t. She finished with the panty hose and sat up in the seat, pulling on a long denim broom skirt. “Anyway, Zach’s a good guy. He likes to play stupid jokes on people and stuff, but he’s a good guy. What happened between him and Shawna wasn’t his fault. They got married because she was pregnant, and he moved here to the ranch and everything, so she could be close to home. He really loved Macey a lot. He’d, like, stay home with her all the time, even when she was a little baby, because Shawna didn’t want to give up rodeoing. Shawna had a good barrel-racing horse, and she was sure she was going to make the National Finals Rodeo. It’s all she ever wanted to do. She never really cared about anything else. She was all into bright lights and glittery shirts. She only got married so she’d have plenty of horses and a place to live, and someone to stay home with the baby.”
“What … what happened?” I felt reality shifting under my feet, turning, changing like one of those sand-and-water desk ornaments that flow into new patterns when they’re flipped upside down. What could have possibly convinced Zach to give up his daughter to a woman like that?
Smoothing her skirt, Becky clipped on her seat belt as the road faded into little more than a cowpath through a pasture that seemed to go on forever. “When Macey was about four, Shawna got the hots for some bull rider up in Cheyenne. He was a big deal in rodeo, like he’s on TV and stuff, and he was traveling the PRCA circuit full-time, and she figured that’d be great. She told Zach she wanted a divorce. When he tried for custody of Macey, she said at the hearing in front of everyone that Macey wasn’t really Zach’s. She’d had a thing with the bull rider before, and he was really Macey’s father. He was a married man when he got Shawna pregnant, and so she told Zach that Macey was his. At th
e custody hearing she had the bull rider there, and they had DNA tests and the whole deal. It turned into one heck of a mess. Zach wound up in jail for the night, and Shawna and the bull rider left with Macey. There wasn’t much Zach could do after that. He took a new job and moved to Austin and didn’t come home very often until Pop had the heart attack. It’s probably hard for him to be there where Macey used to live.”
“Of course it would be,” I muttered. And even harder to extend trust to another woman with a daughter who wasn’t his. It was no wonder that, when I told him I was leaving, he was quick to walk away.
“What Shawna did was really wrong,” Becky chattered on in the passenger seat. “It darned near killed Zach, and then when Shawna divorced the bull rider two years later, she gave the guy custody of Macey. We don’t even know where she is now.” Looking in the mirror, she finger-combed her hair, sucking air through her teeth, making a tsk-tsk. “But that’s my family. One drama after another. Somebody’s always sleepin’ with somebody’s wife, divorcin’ somebody, having someone’s baby, getting arrested for DUI, or bringing guns to a family gathering. We don’t have the best reputation. I’ll tell you, Mama Hawthorne wasn’t thrilled when Jimmy married me. I suppose she figured we’d fall into all that mess. But I’ve learned a lot from Mama and Papa Hawthorne. They fell in love all those years ago, and they never looked at another person. They just knew they were meant to be together. That’s how I want to be.”
“That’s how it should be.” I knew that much was true. If there was a chance, even the slightest possibility, that Zach and I could have that kind of love, I couldn’t let it go this easily. Sydney was right. There was no reason to rush back to Colorado. No reason other than my fear of change and my paranoia over a situation in which I couldn’t manhandle all the parameters. No reason, other than the invisible shackles that, even now, kept me chained to the pain of the past.
Staring at my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that the shackles weren’t invisible. They were imaginary. All of the things that had prevented me from taking a chance on love, on life, on Zach, were in my mind. I had created the barriers when I let fear control me, when I let my past with Geoff obscure the possibility of a future with Zach. I had been locked in a prison of my own making for eight years, and I was the one who held the key. If I was going to take a leap of faith, I had to cast off the chains, once and for all.
A sense of peace, of power and certainty, washed over me, sweeping away the fear on an awesome riptide of determination. I tromped on the gas, and the SUV popped over a hill like a Baja dune buggy. For once in my life, I was going to have one bold day.
“Whoa, careful!” Becky braced her hands on the dash to keep from being buffeted around in the car. “You’re in a hurry.”
“Maa-a—om!” Sydney complained as the SUV fishtailed around a corner and popped over the rim of a canyon. “Oh, my gosh! Look out!”
I hit the brakes and the Jeep skidded sideways, then squealed to a halt. Ahead in the valley, the road disappeared into a slew of mud surrounding a narrow creek that must have flooded with the recent rain.
Becky stuck her head out the window. “Oh, shoot. The creek’s up.” Pounding both hands against the window frame, she flounced back into the seat. “Shoot. We’ll never make it back around the long way. I won’t be there to serve at the cake table, and Mama Hawthorne will kill me.”
I surveyed the bog ahead. There it was, the only thing standing between me and the possibility of a second chance with Zach—a messed-up mass of mire, and muck, and water under the bridge. An appropriate metaphor for my current life situation.
This time I wasn’t going to be stopped. My heart beat faster, and I clenched my jaw, revving the engine and tightening my grip on the steering wheel. “Roll up the windows and check your seat belts, girls. We’re bustin’ through.”
“All right!” Becky cheered.
“Go, Mom!” Sydney yelled.
“Hang on!” Holding my breath, I let off the brake and hit the gas. We rocketed down the hill and into the creek in a hail of wet gravel and dirty water. The tires spun in the mud, found traction, lurching the Jeep forward, then bogged down and spun again. “Come on, come on …” I muttered, pushing the gas pedal to the floor. In the backseat, Sydney echoed my plea, and beside me it looked like Becky was praying.
The tires caught solid ground, and the Jeep jerked, vibrated, then blasted out of the mud hole. I didn’t start breathing again until we were on the other side and there was nothing left to hold us back. Two more hills, three curves, one small mud hole, and we reached the cattle guard that marked the end of the shortcut. When we turned onto the county road, I recognized it immediately. Becky’s shortcut had taken me right back where I’d started from. The Lover’s Oak loomed large ahead.
“The wedding lunch is out behind the Big Lizard.” Becky pointed. “In the trees by the river.” She checked her watch as we sped past the Lover’s Oak and through town. “Oh, thank God. I’m gonna make it in time to serve Mama Hawthorne’s cake.”
I pulled into the ditch near the Over the Moon, because the diner parking lot was filled with an odd conglomeration of cars, pickups, two tractors, three delivery trucks, a UPS van, a propane tanker, and two sheriff’s department vehicles parked haphazardly in the ditch. Everyone in three counties must have come for the wedding festivities.
Becky opened the door before the Jeep stopped. “Thanks, Lindsey. Really. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up. Come on and eat lunch and stay for the wedding, OK? Everyone’s welcome. You haven’t seen a wedding until you’ve seen one under the Lover’s Oak. Even when it’s just old folks doing a repeat, it’s really special.” Widening her eyes insistently, she gave me a pointed look. “Zach’s here.”
“I know,” I said, gazing speculatively toward the Big Lizard. Now that we’d arrived, my courage was waning. What if he didn’t want to see me? Could I handle getting rejected in front of a crowd? And what about Sydney? Whatever was said, she would be right there listening. She’d already been privy to too much adult romantic drama this summer. Maybe it would be better if I took her to Dad’s place. “It might be better if I came back later.” The drive to Killeen would give me time to think about what to say to Zach.
Or time to chicken out …
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Becky prodded, as if she knew that I was waffling. She turned to Sydney in the backseat. “There’s lots of kids. The girls are serving at the buffet tables. You can help me with cake.”
“Cool!” Sydney said, tossing her earphones down and scrambling into the front seat. “Mom, can I go?”
Becky and Sydney looked at me with equal amounts of expectation.
“All right,” I said. No more delay tactics, Lindsey. Time to stop taking the coward’s way out. For once, face life head-on and see what you can make of it. “I’ll pull up into the shade for the dog, and be there in a minute.”
Sydney scrambled out of the seat and stood looking adoringly at her new best friend. Becky patted her on the head. “Don’t worry about her. I’ll keep her with me.” I knew she was trying to give me time to talk to Zach.
“Thanks.”
Becky shrugged. “No problem. You did save my life, after all.” Just before closing the door, she leaned in, her eyes earnest. “You know, the other day when we saw you and Zach at the horse camp, he looked happier than he has in a long time.” She closed the door without saying anything else. She and Sydney hurried off across the parking lot, Sydney jumping like an excited puppy and Becky doing her best to run in high heels.
Pulling into the shade, I cracked the windows and headed for the Big Lizard. The closer I got, the harder my heart pounded. An invisible fist clenched my stomach tighter and tighter, pressing it upward into my lungs until I couldn’t breathe. I stopped, my head whirling. I could hear a crowd behind the building. Tiny rivers of perspiration beaded under my T-shirt and dripped down my back, and a dozen what-ifs ran through my mind.
What if Zach doesn’t want to talk to me? What if he doesn’t feel what I feel? What if he rejects me in front of everyone? What if he doesn’t? What if I end up falling for a guy who lives a thousand miles from my home? What if Sydney gets her hopes up and things don’t work out? What if Zach isn’t looking for something serious? What if he walked away because this was just a casual thing to him? What if I’m making more of it than it is?
What if this is my one chance, and I fail to take it?
I gazed down at my feet, frozen in place, just like in the horse corral.
TWENTY-THREE
THE SOUND OF VOICES AND SHOES SLIDING ON THE GRAVEL YANKED me from my thoughts, and I looked up just as Gracie, in her deputy’s uniform, rushed around the corner of the diner. Zach was behind her, followed by Robert, the deputy from horse psychology class, who was fumbling with his radio while cramming a hot dog into his mouth. Becky was trailing them in her high heels, panting with her eyes wide.
Gracie slid to a halt when she saw me, and Zach sidestepped to keep from colliding with her.
Panic whipped through me. Sydney wasn’t with Becky. Had something happened to her? I had a fleeting vision of my daughter falling into the river and being swept away, like in my dream. “Where’s Sydney?” I glanced toward the corner of the building, hoping Sydney would come trotting up the hill after Becky.
Becky stumbled to an unsteady halt at the edge of the gravel, giving me a bemused frown. “She’s down helping Pop make ice cream. She’s fine.” She glanced from Zach to me, as if waiting for some exchange to begin, then finally gave him a peeved look and added, “Gracie thinks they found the Jubilee tracks.”
Zach stared past me toward the sheriff’s car, his expression hard and narrow, preoccupied. He looked closed and impassive, yet I felt the pull of his nearness. I wanted him to meet my eyes, just for a moment, so I could look through that wall and see what he was thinking.
“The Internet tip from Geoff Attwood paid off,” Gracie explained, seeming oblivious to the tension between Zach and me. Nor did she notice that both of us stiffened at Geoff’s name. “Yesterday a dealer in Dallas forwarded an e-mail about theropod tracks someone was trying to sell anonymously. The sender wasn’t very Internet savvy, because the script on the e-mail led right back to the computers at the San Saline library. So we had the Dallas dealer send a reply asking for photographs of the fossils, and we staked out the computers to see if the seller would come back. Yesterday—nothing. This morning—nothing. But just a little while ago, up drives the B and B Windmills truck. It parks right in front of the library, and one of the Bales brothers goes in. When the sheriff went inside, there was Bo Bales, plain as day, answering the dealer’s e-mail on the library computer. How stupid is that? I guess he thought it was like using a pay phone—nobody would be able to trace it. When the sheriff confronted him, he claimed he didn’t have anything to do with stealing the Jubilee tracks—said he saw the newspaper article and was trying to help track down the thieves. Anyway, we just got the call that the sheriff is picking up a search warrant and heading out to the Bales’s place. He has a feeling we might find the tracks out there, or at least some of the equipment that was used to remove them. Bo and Benny would be the type to try to make a quick buck like that. The sheriff’s been wondering for a while how they were making a living, given that they haven’t installed any windmills since they took over the business from their father. The sheriff thought maybe they had a meth lab out here, but we never could find anything. Bo was a park ranger over at Fossil Ridge years ago, so it makes sense that he would know a little bit about fossils.”
