Sunny and her absolutely charming daughter would never last in this harsh world. He would be a good neighbor, but that was as far as it could go.
Sunny was cooking supper, filling the house with the scent of caramelized onions and tomato sauce for spaghetti, when she noticed through the front window how dark the clouds had grown the past twenty minutes. She left the sauce and went to the window. Great, low pillows of slate gray moved east from the mountains, and distant threads of lightning crackled through them. She stepped outside and inhaled—and a surge of hope went through her. It might be the real thing this time! Rain! If actual rain fell, she was going to stand in it and let it soak her to the skin, feed her dry skin and soak her staticky hair, and open her mouth and drink it into her dusty lungs.
She turned on the station Michael had told her about and they were warning of severe thunderstorms, which sent her hopes even higher. It would have to be a deluge to be heavy enough to reach the ground. Her boss at the restaurant had explained why they could see rain coming out of the clouds, but it never seemed to fall. The drought had left the air so dry and hot that the rain that built up evaporated before it actually made it to the earth, so it took a huge weight of water to break through the layer of dryness.
When the winds started kicking up, she finished cooking supper and turned off the electric stove, and carried Jessie into the living room, where they could watch it come through the big picture window. Jessie wasn’t entirely thrilled by watching the sky, so Sunny started singing, all the songs Jessie loved—“Old McDonald” and “Rock-a-bye Baby” and—a very special favorite—“Bingo.”
Maybe they could name their kitten Bingo. That would be kind of cute.
As the storm approached, Sunny could see long, feathery tendrils of gray coming out of the clouds, and the thunder and lightning crept closer, echoing through the enormous sky. Her spirits soared—how could anyone not find this land beautiful?—and she opened her front door to let the smell in. They stood in the yard, Jessie safely out of the reach of stinging ants and cactus and maybe even the odd snake on the small square of concrete porch in front of the door, Sunny on the ground. The yard was not the traditional yard she’d grown up with, grass and petunias all fed by sprinklers, but it was beautiful in its way. Yucca plants with swords of pale green grew in neat clumps around the prairie land, along with stands of prickly pear and walking-stick cactus that should have been in bloom by now, someone had told her. She’d been hoping to see it, and looked at them hopefully every day, but the buds stayed stubbornly closed.
The sound of the rain reached them first, a soft roar of promise, and Sunny yelped happily, picking up Jessie and swinging her around. She pointed. “Rain!”
Just then, the first drops started to fall. Big, fat drops, heavy as water-balloon bombs, splattering the size of fried eggs on the dry ground. They were slow at first, smacking Sunny’s arms and head every so often. Jessie took one in the face and gave her mother a look that said she was insane. “Inside!”
Sunny ran up the steps and deposited her daughter just inside the door where she could stay dry, but she didn’t go in herself. She turned back to the storm and raised her face and stretched her arms out from her sides to capture as much of it as she could. The raindrops were sporadic at first, barely dampening her clothes, the heat nearly evaporating the moisture between times.
Even if it stayed just like this, Sunny thought, she would be happy. The lush scent of earth dampening with life-giving rain filled the air with a thick perfume, and the humidity rose, feeding her starved cells.
But the sound grew, and the rain came harder, the drops still huge and coming faster, harder, soaking her face, her neck, her blouse. She laughed, opened her mouth to catch it. It was cold, cold rain, as refreshing as a plunge into a swimming pool, and she turned around to let it hit her back, soak her hair, and she was still laughing, feeling a need to shout, “Whoo hoo!” as the noise grew larger and larger, and the rain came harder, soaking her to the skin.
The first pellets of hail were tiny, changing the sound from a roar to a popcorn-popping sound as the ice pellets spattered against the hood of the car and the windows of the house. “Ow!” she cried, and ducked into the shelter of the doorway with Jessie, who peered out solemnly. Hair, clothes and skin soaked, Sunny wiped her face and breathed deeply of the perfume of rain, watching as the hail grew in diameter.
And grew.
And grew. When it got to the size of marbles, she stepped back and closed the door in defense, a thread of alarm gaining strength as the sound doubled, tripled, then became a din so loud that Jessie started crying and covered her ears. Slamming, pounding, roaring, none of them were big enough words for the sound that filled the rooms as the hail gained in strength and size, and Sunny could see nothing beyond the windows but a blizzard of hail.
The first golf-ball-sized pieces broke through the front window, shattering it with a crash of falling glass, and Sunny screamed, turning away in fear. She backed into a doorway and grabbed an afghan off the couch, covering Jessie with it to protect her from flying glass, watching in both wonder and horror as the hail poured through the break, hundreds of ice balls of varying sizes, some of them as big as her fist. Jessie, terrified, howled, and Sunny gently bounced her, murmuring, over and over and over, “It’s okay, baby, it’ll be over soon. It’s okay.” She knew it wouldn’t last. Even Denver, after all, had hail storms. She just hadn’t ever seen one quite like this.
As quickly as it had come, the racket slowed and slowed, slipping to a pitter-patter of dinging hail, then down to only rain again. Jessie stopped crying and Sunny kissed her, taking the blanket off her head. “Everything’s all right now, sweetheart.”
Cautiously, she crossed the living-room floor to the front door and opened it. “Oh, my gosh!” she said in both amazement and horror. The world was completely transformed, the dry prairies running with mini-rivers cutting through piles of hail so thick it looked like snow. The rain had slowed to a trickle—the whole storm had lasted less than twenty minutes—and a bar of sunlight poked through, vividly gold, to touch the smeary, washed-clean world below.
Sunny bent down and picked up the biggest piece of hail she could find. It was nearly the size of a baseball. “Look at that!” she said to Jessie, and put it in her little hand.
“Cold!” Jessie said. “Water?”
“Right.” She picked up another one for herself, and on impulse, took it to the freezer to save for some reason.
It was only then that she thought of her car, and ran back to the doorway to look at it. Hail covered it in piles that were rapidly melting and sliding off, and she dashed down the steps to get a closer look. It was obviously dented, but that wouldn’t hurt anything—everybody’s cars would be dented, no doubt. Saying a sharp, quick little prayer, she squeezed her eyes shut, then reached out an arm and pushed the hail off her windshield.
Her heart sank. A five-inch star, indented as deeply as if a hammer had hit it, marred the center of the glass, with radiating rivers of cracks running from it. “Damn,” she said aloud, trying to keep her despair at bay. “Damn.”
“Dam?” Jessie repeated.
“Ooops. Sorry. Mommy shouldn’t have said that.”
But she had no idea what she was going to do about this. Without a car, she couldn’t get to town for work. It was definitely too far to walk, especially with a baby on her hip. Maybe—
Whatever. She would solve this problem later. Right now, she had to get the hail out of the living room and clean up the glass and get the window covered for the night. Glass for the house wouldn’t cost as much as the windshield, and it would have to be first priority.
“C’mon, sweetie. Let’s get you some dinner, okay? You can eat in your high chair while I clean up this mess.”
“Eat?”
Sunny laughed. Some things, after all, were really important.
Michael assessed the hail damage to his house and outbuildings. The old cottonwoods, who’d outlived far
worse, had taken the brunt of the storm, and a litter of branches and leaves were stuck to the ground, plastered to the walls of the house and barn, but aside from a broken window in a back bedroom of the house, that was the extent of it. When he’d seen how severe the storm promised to be, he’d herded the horses into the barn and stayed there with them. He watered and fed them, then climbed in his truck to see how things were at the top of the hill, where his neighbor’s house sat so exposed.
In spite of the violence of the storm, he felt oddly exhilarated. The air sparkled with the sunlight coming out behind the clouds, the smoke and miasma of the past few weeks simply washed away, and already the drought-savaged plants seemed to be perking up. Any fires that had been burning were certainly quenched, at least on the prairie.
Even before he parked, he saw that Sunny had not been as lucky as he. The front window gaped, and she appeared at the doorway with a shovel in her hand, her hair twisted into a wet mop on top of her head, her hands encased in sturdy rubber gloves. She dumped a load of hail on a pile beside the concrete steps leading to the doorway, spied him and gave a wave.
He got out of the truck, winced when he saw the windshield of her car. “Came to see if you needed some help.”
She raised her eyebrows and then, oddly, gave him a smile. “I won’t turn it down. I’m going to have to patch this window for the night, at the very least. There’s glass all over everything in here and I can’t let Jessie out of her high chair until I get it all cleaned up.”
“Show me.”
She inclined her head. “C’mon in.”
Most of the hail had been shoveled out, and Michael whistled when he saw the pile beside the porch. “Hit just the right angle, huh?”
“’Fraid so. Better the living room than the bedroom, though.”
He looked at her again, surprised. “You seem pretty calm.”
A quick shrug. “Well, no sense crying over spilt milk. Mother Nature does what she does and you might as well make peace with it.” She tucked a hank of hair behind her ear and gave him a wry grin. “I’m always laughing at people on flood plains who are surprised when it floods, or people on the coasts who lose everything in a hurricane and are shocked.”
Michael laughed. “In Colorado, it hails.”
“Right.” With a sigh, she carried her shovel into the house, and he followed her inside.
As he came into the room, Jessica said from her high chair, where she was smeared with spaghetti, “Hi, there!”
For some reason, his entire chest warmed. “Hi, kiddo!”
She held out a fistful of noodles. “Want some?”
He bent and pretended to take a bite. “Yum!” Sunny returned to her task, kneeling to sweep the last of the hailstones, now melting into a big puddle, into a shovel, along with shards of broken glass. Her arms were stronger than he had first thought, and her legs showed strong muscles. He grunted. Round and blond did not necessarily mean weak. She waited tables for a living after all. Not exactly a lightweight job. “Let me help you,” he said.
“I’ve got this part. What I’m worried about is finding something to cover the window until I can get new glass.” She shoveled another load, nearly the last of it, and carried it to the door. “Any ideas?”
“I’ve got some plywood. Screw it in and you’ll be set for a few days, anyway.”
“All right.” She angled the shovel beneath the last bit of hail, and carried the dripping load to the porch. “Whew! That was a big fat mess. I guess I have to just let the hail melt and let the glass dry, sweep it up later.” A shadow crossed her face as she caught sight of the car, the first real dismay he’d seen there. But she didn’t say anything, just sighed and headed for the kitchen. “I’m going to get the mop.”
“Hey,” he said, and grabbed her arm. “Why don’t you sit for a minute, dry your hair?”
“I don’t want Jessie to get restless, and I can’t let her down till I know all the glass is gone.”
“Sit,” he said, and pushed on her shoulder a little. “Where’s the mop?”
“You really don’t have to—”
He guessed cleaning materials would be in a small, narrow closet, and pulled it open. “You didn’t have to fry chicken for ten hungry men, either, but you did.”
“Want some?” Jessie said, holding out a fist of spaghetti toward her mother.
Sunny mimed taking a big bite, then raised those big blue eyes to Michael’s face. “Truth is, I have a bigger favor to ask if I’m going to cash one in.”
“Shoot.” He took the mop out of the closet, lifted the bucket to the sink to fill it up.
“My windshield is destroyed and I can’t drive to town. If I don’t work, I don’t eat.”
“You need a ride, then?”
She lowered her eyes, nodded.
“That’s not a problem, Sunny. It’s not but five miles.”
“I have to be to work at 6:00 a.m.”
He grinned. “Maybe you city types think that’s early, but ’round here, that’s midmorning.”
The words had the exact effect he’d hoped for—the worry and strain fell away from her sweet, pretty features, and she raised a grateful smile to him. For a minute, that’s all there was in the world, just Sunny’s columbine-blue eyes resting on his face gratefully, and he found himself wondering what it would be like to have a woman around again. Not for sex, necessarily. For company. For—
Don’t, he told himself. She was a city girl. She might be down on her luck just this minute, but he knew it wouldn’t last. There was drive and steely ambition in a woman who could move out to the Plains in desperation to give herself and her daughter a chance at a decent life. But the Plains, with their trials, would never hold her.
Chapter 5
By the time they got the window covered with a sturdy plank of plywood, the sun had long gone, and Sunny felt the exhaustion in every pore in her body. Michael had insisted that she go ahead and bathe Jessica, who was getting quite cranky by the end of it, and put her to bed, and by the time the little girl dropped off, Michael was putting the last screws in the frame.
The sight of him startled her the slightest bit, maybe because she was so tired it was impossible to keep her guard up, or because it was such a relief to be able to count on a man to take care of something, to not have to do every single thing herself. “Thank you,” she said, and sank down on the couch. “I don’t know what I would have done without your help.”
“I bet you’d have figured something out.” He tucked his drill into the case, and snapped the hinges closed. “Anything else you can think of?”
“Not tonight. Thank you. I’ll have to cook something especially good for you to pay you back.”
He grinned. “If everything you cook is as good as that chicken, I’ll take you up on that offer. Bachelor cooking gets old fast, let me tell you.”
“What’s your favorite meal?”
There wasn’t even a beat of hesitation. “Pork chops, gravy, mashed potatoes.”
Sunny laughed. “That sounds like a hungry man. Did you have supper?”
A puzzled frown touched his brow. “I guess not.”
“Me, either,” she said. “If you’ll give me two minutes to take a shower, I’ll fix us both something to eat.”
“You don’t have to do that, Sunny.”
“I’m going to cook for myself, anyway. What are you going to eat when you go back home? TV dinner in the microwave?” His shrug told her all she needed to know. She nodded, got to her feet. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back in a flash.”
“Flashing?” he said, mockingly hopeful.
Sunny turned, not entirely sure he was flirting. He met her gaze with a little wiggle of eyebrows. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, huh?”
She shook her head. “Tsk tsk.”
The shower was heavenly. She didn’t bother with any makeup or anything fancy—he’d already seen her at her worst, so clean and brushed would probably be a big improvement. When she stepped ou
t of the small bathroom, she smelled coffee brewing. “You are an angel,” she said, coming around the corner. “That smells so good!”
“I’m glad you don’t mind. I needed some, all of a sudden. What a day, huh?”
She looked in the fridge, narrowed her eyes, starting putting things on the counter. Ham, eggs, a half loaf of banana bread she’d made a few days before, butter. “Sit down, cowboy. Let me wait on you for a few minutes, so I don’t feel guilty in the morning about dragging you all the way to town.”
He chuckled, and Sunny raised her head at the sound. It was rich and warm as an autumn noon. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You really need to laugh more often,” she said.
He met her gaze. “Yeah. Maybe I’ve forgotten about it.” He waved one graceful hand. “That it’s good for you, I mean.”
“How long has it been?” Sunny asked, turning on the oven to warm the banana bread. She thought about turning on the radio, but crickets had started singing outside the window and it was such a peaceful song, it seemed a hundred times better than a radio.
“Since I laughed? Or since my wife left me?”
What woman in her right mind would leave this man? Sitting there in the bad green light from the overhead fluorescent, he still looked wonderful. Not handsome, exactly, and certainly not pretty in the way of a movie Indian, but she loved the fullness of his mouth, the angle of his bear-dark eyes, his hands, so long and graceful, the color of nutmeg, braced around his mug. Not to mention the competence factor!
Some women, she decided, had no sense at all. “Both. Either.” She heated some butter in a skillet and dropped in thick slices of ham, scattered brown sugar over the top. “You pick.”
“Just over a year, I guess. On both.” He sipped coffee. “You?”
“Five minutes since I last laughed. About fifteen before that.” She grinned over her shoulder as she broke eggs. “With Miss Jessie doing her antics every second, it’s hard not to get a daily dose of good medicine.”
Lakota Legacy: Wolf DreamerCowboy Days and Indian NightsSeven Days Page 19
