Long, Hot Texas Summer

by Brown, Carolyn

  “Dina was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Loretta said. “I caught them kissing in the barn and didn’t even give him a chance to explain. I didn’t want to hear excuses that day. I was wrong, plain and simple. I should’ve knocked the hell out of her and then started on him.”

  “Why? We thought you were the match made in heaven,” Heather said. “We all wanted to be you and find our knight in shining armor—or at least an old green-and-white pickup truck.”

  “I read a magnet thing on the refrigerator this morning that said the hardest lesson in life is letting go. The end of the quote said that we fight to hold on and we fight to let go.”

  “And?” Heather asked.

  “I was tired of fighting for either side back then. Jackson’s mother was lucid enough to tell me several times a day that he would have never married me if I hadn’t been pregnant. I wasn’t blind. I could see that he was flirting when we were among a group or after church. Sly little looks. Cute smiles that used to belong to just me. Hey, I couldn’t blame him. He’d been saddled with a wife right after high school graduation and a child the next February when he should have been living in a frat house at some fancy college, so I had enough fuel when I saw Dina wrapped around him like an octopus to fire up my temper real good,” Loretta said.

  “She’s saying that you hit her this morning,” Maria said.

  “How in the hell did you find that out so fast?” Loretta asked.

  Maria shrugged. “She called Abigail Proctor and whined about it. Abigail told Tansy at church and Tansy called her sister, who is my friend, and she told me. You don’t keep anything secret in the canyon. You know that, Loretta.”

  Loretta’s mascara flowed down her cheeks in big black streaks by the time she finished telling the Dina-of-the-morning story. “I’m sorry for laughing so hard. It’s really kind of pitiful, but lookin’ back, it is funny too.”

  “Some people never grow up,” Maria said.

  “My ex didn’t.” Heather turned up her beer and drank the last of it. “I’m ready for a sandwich. I slept until noon and had a candy bar for breakfast.”

  “Speaking of never growing up,” Loretta said.

  Heather stuck her tongue out at Loretta as she pulled bread, bologna, and mustard from a brown paper bag.

  “What, no lettuce and tomatoes and cheese?” Loretta asked.

  “Patience, girlfriend. Patience.” She brought out a plastic container of sliced tomatoes, one of lettuce, and a third one containing cheese slices. “And for Maria, ta-da.” She fished out a fourth container with dill pickle slices.

  “A feast fit for three divorced women. Welcome home, Loretta. We’re so glad you are here,” Maria said.

  “It’s a feast, but, darlin’, I am not home. I wouldn’t even be here if Nona hadn’t decided to quit college. She’s only got one more year and she’ll have her degree,” Loretta said.

  “I hear the words. I don’t believe there’s much conviction there,” Heather laughed.

  “Hand me the pickles. I haven’t had a sandwich like this in years,” Loretta said, ignoring her.

  Heather passed the pickles across the quilt. “You are evading the issue.”

  “Heather is a schoolteacher in Silverton, if you are wondering,” Maria said. “And I’m helping Daddy and Mama run the family farm east of Claude. Daddy isn’t well and Mama can’t do it all herself.”

  “I’m sorry. What’s wrong with Luiz?” Loretta asked.

  “Diabetes. He’s lost both legs below the knees and he’s in a wheelchair. He’s still a good boss, but there are a lot of things he flat-out can’t do. All of the other kids have roots and families. So the lot fell to me. When the time comes, the farm will be mine, though, so I don’t mind,” she answered.

  “I’m really sorry to hear that, Maria,” Loretta said.

  Maria nodded. “Thank you. How’s your folks?”

  “Mad at me for being here. One sister is praying for me. One is ready to string me up. Mama’s giving me ultimatums and Daddy, bless his heart, puts guilt trips on me without even trying.”

  “That’s two,” Heather said. “What about the other one?”

  “Dolly is a drama professor. She plays several roles in one phone call,” Loretta answered.

  “Well, we hope that you change your mind and stick around. It’s great having you here,” Maria said.

  “Thanks. What’s the story about your ex, Heather? Got kids?”

  She held up a finger and finished chewing, swallowed, and took a sip of her second beer. “No kids. Six miscarriages and then a doctor said that I needed a hysterectomy at thirty. I can’t blame my ex for anything except that we drifted apart. I was teaching and he was in the service. He was on deployment as much as he was at home and one day we both realized we were married but not married, if you know what I mean. We parted friends and still talked up until six months ago, when he remarried. He retired from the service after twenty years, went to work as a postman over in Tucumcari, where his family lives, and reconnected with his high school sweetheart. They seem real happy and she’s pregnant. They’re happy and I’m happy that they are.”

  “God! Pregnant at our age,” Loretta groaned.

  Loretta waited until Heather and Maria were gone before she checked behind the wide bench seat in the truck. She squealed when she found it. She’d recognize that wedding ring quilt anywhere. It was the one that she and Jackson always used when they made out under that oak tree. It was the one that he’d spread out in the truck bed when they’d had sex for the first time. And they’d wrapped it around Nona that first winter when they took her outside to see her first snowflakes. She pulled it out, let the tailgate down, and spread it out in the truck bed, then stretched out and watched the sun drift slowly toward the western edge of the canyon.

  She heard footsteps and whistling and then Jackson’s face appeared over the edge of the truck bed. He tilted his hat back and scanned her from head to toe, his gaze turning up the temperature in the truck bed at least twenty degrees.

  “I hope you used a ton of sunscreen if you’ve spent the whole afternoon out here,” he said.

  She looked up into his eyes. “Mostly the girls and I stayed under the shade tree, but yes, I did.”

  He moved from the fender to sit on the tailgate, legs stretched from one side to the other. He’d changed from jeans to khaki shorts and a green tank top the same color as his eyes. There was enough of a five o’clock shadow on his face to be damn sexy. Her fingertips itched to play in his dark hair that was long enough to curl up on the back of his neck and cover half his ears.

  “You need a haircut,” she said.

  He left his perch and crawled up to stretch out beside her, being careful not to touch her. “So when are you giving me a haircut? I’ve hated going to the barbershop. It’s not the same as when you took care of it for me. I don’t like the way they cut it and I sure don’t like that the lady wears clothes.”

  Loretta felt the heat rising into a full-fledged blush, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She’d cut his hair the first time when they were seventeen. They’d been sitting in the back of the truck, both of them just out of the water from skinny-dipping.

  “From that crimson in your cheeks, I guess you remember,” he chuckled.

  She threw her arm up over her eyes. “Does Rosie cut your hair?”

  “Why would you ask a fool question like that?”

  “I’m Rosie for the next week. If she doesn’t cut your hair, then I don’t,” Loretta said.

  “Then I guess it’ll have to get long enough to put into a ponytail,” he said.

  “How long do you intend for that ponytail to get?”

  He grinned. “You decide. But I didn’t come out here to talk about my hair.”

  “I know. This is part of your Sunday routine, right?”

  �
�Yes, it is,” he answered. “And I can’t get that incident with Dina off my mind. Why didn’t you stay and fight for us the way that Nona fought for Travis? I would have gladly paid the bail to get you out of jail for assaulting Dina. Looking back, I think I was trying to get a rise out of you,” he said.

  The arm went down and she popped straight up to a sitting position. “Why in the hell would you do that?”

  “I saw the way the guys flirted with you, the way they always left their hand on your shoulder a second too long, and a hundred other little things. I knew that I ruined your dreams of going to college when I got you pregnant. You were valedictorian of our senior class, for God’s sake. Your folks were taking you to the University of Oklahoma to enroll you right after graduation, but then you found out you were pregnant. You could have been anything you wanted. Truth is, I felt guilty, so I was trying to make you jealous to make myself feel better. I wanted you to fight for me, to prove that I hadn’t ruined your life and your dreams,” he said.

  “My dreams? We were both young and stupid. I didn’t see a single man flirting with me. I only saw you winking and smiling at the women, especially Dina, like y’all had a little inside joke, and then it all came to a head in the barn. You’d even signed to play for Texas A&M and you had to give it up for me. It had to sting, Jackson.”

  He sighed. “Mama wanted me to go to college. I wanted to ranch. Sound familiar?”

  He didn’t make a move to scoot closer to her or to say anything else. The rays of the sun at the end of the day warmed their skin. The ever-blowing west Texas wind kicked up dust devils but they didn’t see them. The creek kept right on flowing to wherever it dumped into a bigger body of water.

  The earth didn’t stand still and time kept right on marching. Nothing changed because they’d confessed to past feelings, but Loretta’s heart felt lighter than it had since the morning she’d told Jackson that she was pregnant.

  “This is nice,” he finally mumbled.

  “It is, isn’t it? Jackson, I’m not your mother, but I do want Nona to finish her education, even if it’s in vet tech or business agriculture. And this thing that’s between us—” she said and paused.

  “Can go at any rate you want it to,” he finished for her.

  “Thank you.”

  “I always thought if you came back I’d take delight in kicking your ass off the ranch,” he chuckled.

  “I always thought if I came back I’d find Dina in my bed,” she said.

  He propped up on an elbow but didn’t let go of her hand. “Honey, there hasn’t been a single woman in your bed, not in all these years.”

  “And in the other beds in the house?”

  “You first, darlin’. If you want to drag out the bones of what happened after we divorced, then you get to go first. If you want to leave them all buried, then we will,” he said seriously.

  “Fight to let go,” she mumbled. It meant more than she’d thought at first. If she wanted to have something to fight for, then she had to learn to let go of the past, and that meant all of it. She couldn’t pick and choose what she wanted to forget, what she wanted to remember, and what she wanted to store away for future arguments. She needed to write the future on a clean slate.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just something I read on the refrigerator this morning that made a lot of sense to me. How do you ever really bury the past?” she asked. “It’s what molded us into the people we are today. Let’s go wade in the water to cool off.”

  He pulled his hand free and hopped off the tailgate. “Upstream or down?”

  “You choose,” she said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  RANCHING IN JUNE IS VERY DIFFERENT than ranching in the fall or even in the winter. It all came back to Loretta as she prepared sandwiches to take to the field for the hands that Monday morning. There are always daily chores: feeding, milking, working cattle, plowing. That’s year-round work, but summer on a ranch is busy with a capital B. It’s a time of planting, harvesting, hay hauling, and praying for rain, then when the storm clouds gather, the work speeds up even faster to get the hay in before it gets soaked in the field.

  She wasn’t ready for it on a full-time, forever status. How could Nona want this when she had so much more potential? As always, no matter how much she argued with herself, she couldn’t find an answer to her questions.

  She’d planned to make fried chicken for dinner, but Nona called at midmorning and said that there was no way with the dark clouds overhead that they could leave the hayfield. It was cut, raked, and dry and they needed to get it baled and in the barn before the rain hit.

  She set up an assembly line on the bar like Rosie had taught her when she was a teenager. Lay out a whole loaf of bread, smear mayonnaise on half, light on the mustard on the other half. Meat, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, top it with a plain slice of bread and then gently put them into the ziplock bags. Stack the mayonnaise ones in the blue plastic container in the pantry; mustard in the yellow one. Two containers of each at least—the hired hands would be starving, since they’d gone to work at daybreak.

  She loaded it all along with four boxes of individually wrapped chips and several packages of cookies, a plastic garbage bag to put the trash inside, and the green cooler full of ice with two of the big five-gallon containers of sweet tea. They’d eat in shifts and if there were leftovers, she’d leave it all behind for snacks through the afternoon. If they couldn’t come in for supper, she’d repeat the process when Nona or Jackson called.

  Nona hopped off the back of a hay truck as soon as Loretta parked. Dusty, dirty, and sweaty, Nona wolfed down two sandwiches and two cups of sweet tea. She tossed her trash in the bag that Loretta had hung on the edge of the tailgate and shoved four cookies into her shirt pocket as she headed inside the barn to trade places with Travis.

  “Mornin’, Miz Loretta.” Travis tipped his misshapen straw hat. He ate twice as much and even faster than Nona.

  “Feels like rain,” she said.

  “Feels like a big storm in the making, ’scuse my language. We’ll be lucky if we get this all off the ground and in the barn before it starts,” he said. “Thanks for dinner. Unless it comes a frog strangler, we’ll see you again at suppertime.”

  Loretta didn’t need a Ranching for Dummies book to know what he was saying. Unless it started to rain so hard that the frogs were in danger, she would be making more sandwiches that evening. If it did start to pour, then they’d have to stop and take a loss on what was lying in windrows out there in the fields.

  Jackson parked a loaded flatbed truck, crawled out, and stretched. His hair was plastered to his head with sweat. Dirt beads circled his neck and bits of hay stuck to his faded jeans. The blue knit shirt that stretched across his arms and broad chest looked as if he’d been a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest.

  Loretta’s breath caught in her chest. This was the Jackson she remembered best; the cowboy who worked as hard as he loved. Had she really ever been married to him?

  “Thanks for bringing us something to the field. Didn’t seem right for me and Nona to take a lunch break when the rest have to keep working.” He picked up a sandwich and bit into it.

  “I’m Rosie. It’s my job,” she said. “Y’all don’t need me to watch you eat, do you?”

  He shook his head. “I reckon we can manage on our own.”

  “I brought my gloves and my hat. I’m going to help this afternoon. I’ll quit long enough to go make sandwiches for supper, but right now I’m going to help stack hay.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For being you,” he said. “You can drive the truck on the way back out to the field.”

  “I can throw hay on this round and someone else can do the driving. I’m rested. Y’all are beginning to flag.”

  He chuckled as she walked away.

 
She whipped around. “What?”

  “One week and you’re already givin’ orders. Welcome home, Loretta,” he answered.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Don’t read more into it than it is. I’m bored in the house. That’s the real story.”

  “Whatever you say, darlin’.”

  In a few long strides she was nose to nose with him. “Don’t you get sarcastic with me, Jackson.”

  “Or what? You’ll go home?”

  “Or I’ll stay and make your life miserable,” she said.

  Nona shot out of the barn. “Mama, are you and Daddy fighting?”

  “Yes, we are,” Loretta said. “But it’s our fight, so you go on and leave us alone.”

  Nona looked from one to the other. “You want to meet behind the barn at daylight with pistols drawn? Or how about butcher knives in the kitchen? I’d go for the pistols. Or worse yet, Mama, how would you like to sit on the sofa and hold hands with Daddy for an hour?”

  Jackson laughed.

  Loretta tried not to grin but it didn’t work. “Knives or guns—I always hated that holding-hands shit when I was a kid.”

  “Then my vote is for the holding-hands shit,” Jackson said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing for damn sure. You must not be working as hard as me and Travis, because if you were, you wouldn’t have the energy to fight,” Nona said.

  Loretta’s phone buzzed in her hip pocket and she reached for it.

  “Saved by the bell,” Jackson said.

  “It’s Emmy Lou,” she said.

  “Punishment served.” Nona smiled.

  Three bone-tired people came dragging through the kitchen door at two in the morning. The barn was full and the rest of the summer would be spent making the big round bales that stayed out in the fields covered in white plastic.

  Lightning flashed through the sky in a long jagged streak, followed immediately by a clap of thunder so loud that it rattled the dishes in the cabinets.