A Small Town Thanksgiving

by Marie Ferrarella

  At the mention of a reservation in the area, Sam’s eyes had widened and she’d answered that she hadn’t even known there was a reservation in the area. At that point, Mike announced they had to be going, thereby abruptly cutting the conversation short and, incidentally, prompting Sam’s question about being regarded as a tagalong as they left the sheriff’s office.

  Mike made no effort to stifle the impatient sigh he exhaled. None of this had been easy for him. While he did like the people who lived and worked in Forever, bringing Sam around and making all those introductions wasn’t exactly a piece of cake—or second nature for him. On his own, he tended to keep to himself. If he averaged ten words an hour, he considered that talkative.

  “This is about the reservation, isn’t it?” he asked her.

  “In part,” she allowed. She did want to go see it, but he didn’t seem inclined to go anywhere else today. “But it’s also about feeling as if I’m a burden to you.”

  “Well, you are,” he said bluntly, the retort just coming out on its own. The next moment, he reconsidered his answer when he saw the look on her face. She was trying to mask it, but he could see that he’d hurt her feelings.

  Well, what did he expect? he upbraided himself. After all Sam was a female and even Alma didn’t have a hide like a rhino all the time—just most of it.

  He tried his hand at a little damage control and attempted to backtrack. “But I guess that’s not your fault,” he said expansively in an attempt to erase the sting of his previous words. At a loss how to make this better, he threw up his hands. “Look, I’m not a people person.”

  “I would have never guessed.” But there was an amused smile on her lips so he decided she didn’t mean that sarcastically.

  “Maybe you would have been better off if Ray had been the one to take you around,” he told her. “Ray’s a people person. He’s better at this kind of stuff— introductions and small talk—and I can probably train those horses better than he can.”

  “I’m sure you probably could.” He struck her as the kind of man who could do anything he set his mind to without any limits, although she hadn’t a shred of evidence to back up her beliefs. She was just going entirely on her gut. “But I’m not complaining,” she pointed out.

  “Then what was that bit about feeling like a kid brother tagging along?” He wanted that cleared up. Was she just making a wisecrack, or was there something behind her comparison?

  “That was a statement of fact,” she informed him. “You were treating me exactly like some kid you were hoping to lose in the crowd and I thought that maybe you weren’t aware of it and if I brought the matter to your attention—”

  “I’d stop doing it,” he concluded.

  Sam inclined her head, indicating he’d guessed it on the first try. “Something like that.”

  And then Sam searched his face, wondering if she’d crossed a line and offended him. For a moment she thought she had, but then he asked her, “You want to see the reservation?”

  Well, she wasn’t expecting that. He certainly knew how to catch a person off her guard.

  “I’d love to,” she told him with enthusiasm.

  “It’s not going to be like the Hollywood version of an outdoor flea market or whatever it is that they call these things in places where people can’t make ends meet from week to week on what they can raise,” he told her, then informed her gruffly, “You’re not going to see colorful blankets spread out on the ground with all sorts of jewelry, clothes and moccasins on them, made by some enterprising Navajo who’s trying to sell them.”

  “I’m not expecting that,” she told him sincerely. Taking a breath, she asked, “Just how run-down is the reservation?”

  Her question surprised him. Maybe she wasn’t as naive as he thought. “It’s better now than it used to be,” he answered. “Joe and Ramona got the younger tribe members to take some pride in their homes and since then, things are steadily being built up. Still got a long ways to go, but at least they’ve gotten started.”

  That was what she wanted to see. The places where progress was being made. In addition, she really wanted to be able to connect to the locals since their ancestors had probably been the ones who had captured Miguel’s ancestor all those many years ago. She wanted to be able to see what Marguerite had seen, view it through her eyes.

  “You mentioned someone named Ramona,” Sam began to ask.

  “That’s the sheriff’s sister—Joe’s wife,” he told her as they headed back to his truck. “She’s also the local vet. Both Rick and Ramona have some Navajo blood in them, as well as a mixture of other tribes,” was all he’d say on the subject. As far as he was concerned, announcing their heritage or keeping it private was up to Rick and his sister, not him.

  “I guess that makes them all-American,” Sam theorized.

  “Yeah, I guess it does.”

  Maybe taking this woman around wasn’t really so bad after all, Mike grudgingly thought. And, except for the reservation, which he saw to be more or less of a drive-by, they were done. That meant he would have several hours of good daylight left. He could still get a few things done once they got back to the ranch—if the woman didn’t ask too many questions and hold him up, Mike silently qualified.

  * * *

  THE ALL-TOO-QUICK drive through the Navajo reservation had left her extremely quiet. He didn’t think it was natural, not for her.

  Mike glanced at her to see if she’d fallen asleep. But her eyes were open. As for her expression, she seemed to look solemn.

  “Something wrong?” he finally asked, thinking that if there was something wrong, he’d do better to find out now instead of later, when he got her back to the ranch house. He’d gotten to know her well enough today to feel that having her so quiet—especially voluntarily—was almost eerie.

  “That’s better?” Sam finally asked him.

  Sam’s question caught him completely off guard. “What?”

  “You said that the conditions on the reservation have improved,” she reminded him, banking down her impatience. “I asked if what I saw represented ‘better’ in your estimation.”

  Was that all? “Well, it’s not going to make the front page of any magazine, but yeah, what you saw today is actually better. Remember, I said better than it used to be,” he qualified.

  “Yes, you did say that,” she agreed, backing off and willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But she was still left wondering how people could accept living in those conditions. A lot of the homes she saw were little more than shells constructed against the elements. “Is there anything I can do?”

  He wasn’t following her. “About what?”

  “About the conditions on the reservation,” she stressed, enunciating each word slowly and with emphasis. “Some of those homes looked like they didn’t even have any electricity.” She tried to imagine what it had to be like, doing without power, without lights—and couldn’t fathom it lasting for more than an hour or two.

  “Some of them don’t,” he informed her with a shrug. That was just the way things were. “But as far as you doing something about the conditions, well, that’s a tricky road to walk.” After all, she wasn’t one of them and they did take offense easily. “The people on the reservation have got a hell of a lot of pride. They don’t like being in someone’s debt—and they sure as hell don’t like being thought of as charity cases.”

  That wasn’t how she saw them, but she had a feeling that saying so wasn’t the solution. “Well, I wouldn’t want to insult them,” she told him.

  The wheels in her head were spinning. She had some connections through her work. The book that she’d done two books before this one had been for a man, Andrew Whitman, who had built himself up. He’d gone from nothing to owning too many corporations to count. Wanting to give back, he was always looking for worthwhile causes.
She could give him a call, tell him about the reservation.

  “I was just thinking along the lines of a fund-raiser,” she told Mike, the eagerness in her voice growing.

  “Still charity,” Mike pointed out.

  “There are kids involved,” she countered. She’d seen several groups of children with eyes mirroring souls that were far older that the bodies that housed them.

  “Pride should take a backseat when it comes to taking care of children. Besides, I’m not talking about some sort of endless charity, I’m talking about a helping hand, something to get them kick-started. You know, teach a man to fish rather than give a man a fish kind of a thing.”

  Mike supposed that the woman meant well. She certainly didn’t look like one of those people who enjoyed building up their own self-esteem by slumming about in areas that were badly in need of help, coming up with suggestions that were engineered, for the most part, to make themselves look better and little else.

  “Run whatever idea you have past Joe,” he suggested. “He’d be the one who could tell you if what you were proposing was going to work or not.” And then a thought suddenly hit him. “Does this mean you’re not going to be working on those journals my dad found?”

  Was that hope she heard in his voice? She really couldn’t tell. The man certainly played his cards close to his vest.

  “No, that’s still my first priority,” she told him in no uncertain terms. “It’s just that seeing the reservation kind of made everything more vivid for me.”

  Mike nodded at her words in such a way she felt as if they had just gone in one ear and out the other. And then he asked her, “You about ready to start heading back to the house?”

  She was rather tired—all in all, with the trip, plus the tour, she had put in an extremely long day—and it wasn’t nearly over yet. Sam nodded in response to his question. “I think that I’ve seen enough for one day. Thanks,” she added in a whole different tone.

  The single word, enthusiastically uttered, threw him. “For what?”

  She smiled at him. “For being my guide, however reluctantly.”

  There was no point in attempting to correct her. He had started out reluctantly, feeling more like an unpaid nanny than a guide or anything else. But this tour that had been forced on him had also allowed him to get to know this woman a little better and he had to admit that he did like what he’d glimpsed today.

  Sam Monroe wasn’t nearly as stuck-up or empty-headed as he’d initially thought. As a matter of fact, in all fairness, he had to admit that she wasn’t either one of these things. At the end of the day, she was a pretty decent sort of person.

  “You’re welcome,” he mumbled. Reaching his truck, he got in on his side, waiting for her to follow suit on the passenger side. “If we hurry,” he told her, “we can make dinner.”

  “You mean we might be late?” She hadn’t realized they were cutting it this close. Why hadn’t he said anything? At the very least, they could have skipped Murphy’s. She could have always met the owners at some other time.

  “We might be,” he allowed, turning on the ignition. “You never know what can happen.”

  Had he pulled her leg for some reason she couldn’t fathom at the moment?

  “What time is dinner again?” she asked.

  He glanced at his watch. “In half an hour,” he told her mildly.

  Her eyes widened. “Why didn’t you say something?” Sam demanded in frustration. There was nothing she hated more than being late unless it was keeping someone waiting, which was the opposite side of the being late coin.

  “I just figured you wouldn’t want me to rush you, seeing as how we’re on so much better footing now than we were this morning,” he told her loftily. Mike stepped on the accelerator and the speedometer began to climb correspondingly.

  Sam had no idea if he was being serious, or if they’d slid back to square one and he was just mocking her again and being sarcastic. She found that with Mike, it was hard to tell.

  Sam crossed her fingers and hoped for the best—on all fronts.

  * * *

  MIGUEL WAS OUT on the porch, pacing, his eyes never leaving the darkened road, when the truck finally came into view as it drove toward the house.

  Finally.

  Nothing had befallen them, Miguel thought with no small relief.

  The older man’s face lit up the moment he saw them. He was hurrying down the three steps, wanting to meet them, as Mike parked his vehicle and turned off the ignition.

  “I was beginning to worry that something had happened,” Miguel called out, raising his voice to be heard above the engine. When Mike turned it off, he lowered his voice accordingly. “You have been gone a long time,” Miguel observed. “And you forgot to take your cell phone again,” he told his son, his eyes narrowing momentarily in exasperation.

  “I didn’t forget,” Mike corrected his father. “I just didn’t take it.” Leaving it behind had been a matter of choice as far as he was concerned.

  “My son does not like modern conveniences,” Miguel explained to his houseguest haplessly.

  “It’s not a convenience,” Mike countered. “It’s a damn inconvenience to be hounded every time I turn a corner, what with the ringing and the buzzing and all those other noises the damn thing makes.”

  “That’s the music,” Ray informed him, coming to the doorway to greet Sam. He smiled at her as he told his brother, “And that’s also the text buzzer just letting you know that someone sent you a text message.”

  Mike had no patience with all these new ways to communicate. In his estimation, there was nothing wrong with the old way and he was a firm believer in the “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” adage.

  “Someone wants to send me a message,” he growled, “they can call me like everyone else.”

  “What good would that do if you keep leaving your cell phone lying around every chance you get?” Ray asked him.

  “You’ve got a point,” Mike agreed. “I’m going to have to think about that a bit to come up with an answer,” he deadpanned. “In the meantime, let’s eat before we starve our houseguest here,” he concluded, jerking a thumb in Sam’s direction.

  She noticed she was “their” houseguest when it meant that Mike would get something out of the argument.

  That just might be a point worth remembering, Sam thought.

  Chapter Eight

  The dinner was excellent. His housekeeper had outdone herself, but Miguel’s mind was not on what was on his plate, but on the young woman seated to his left at his table.

  He found her to be lively, engaging and amusing. In short, he liked her. Liked her a great deal. She was enthusiastic about the project that lay ahead of her, had intelligent questions about the town she had toured today and he sensed she was being genuine about wanting to find a way to help the Native Americans who either chose to remain on the reservation or, due to circumstances they were not able to control or change, were forced to remain there even if they would have preferred to leave and forge their own path.

  Though he hadn’t actually experienced any uneasiness about it previously, he now felt that his decision to entrust his great-great-great-grandmother’s story to this small slip of a thing had been a good one.

  Finished with dinner, Miguel moved his plate back. “So, if you have no objections,” he said, continuing to address Sam, “I would like you to begin reading the diaries tomorrow morning. I want your honest opinion about the wisdom of turning the journals into a book for my grandchildren to read someday.”

  “Absolutely,” Sam quickly agreed with enthusiasm. With the ease of someone accustomed to caring for herself and effortlessly handling all the details that went into running a household, Sam began to clear away and stack up the dishes as she went on talking with her new employer. “But if it is all
the same to you, I’d rather get started tonight, not tomorrow morning,” she told him, taking Mike’s dish and placing it on top of her own. Leaving both sets of cutlery on top, she reached for Miguel’s.

  “Tonight?” Miguel echoed. Her request caught him off guard. “I would think that you would want to rest, get a good night’s sleep first, before facing all that tedious work—some of the writing is very faint and difficult to make out,” he warned.

  She reached for Ray’s plate as well as his knife and fork, slipping the plate beneath the other plates while depositing the cutlery with the rest that she was accumulating on top.

  “I’m much too excited about getting to read her journals to sleep, Miguel,” she confessed to him. “So if you have no objections, I’d appreciate you letting me see them tonight so I can at least glance through what I’ll be facing tomorrow.”

  She really was the right choice, Miguel thought happily. “If that is what you wish,” he told her, inclining his head. Then, unable to ignore her piling up the dishes any longer, he finally asked, “What are you doing?”

  She was so involved in the project they were talking about, for a moment Sam didn’t know what Miguel’s question referred to. She blinked, about to ask him what he meant, then realized he was watching her hands. Belatedly, she realized he had to be asking her about the dishes she was gathering.

  “Clearing the table,” she answered simply.

  “Why?” Miguel asked, somewhat mystified. This was what Alma did on occasion when she came for lunch or dinner. But guests did not do chores.

  Sam was the face of innocence as she answered, “Because we’re through eating and the dishes were just sitting there.”

  Rather than Miguel, it was Mike who rose and put his hand on her wrist to stop her from reaching for any more dishes. As she looked at him quizzically, he took the pile of plates with its cutlery out of her hands and placed the entire collection on the table.