McKettricks Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  Jesse winced. “Even worse,” he replied.

  “People need places to live.”

  “So do critters,” Jesse said. He’d been hungry when he’d suggested supper at the Roadhouse. Now, he wasn’t sure he could choke down any part of that cheeseburger. “We’ve got so many coyotes and bobcats coming right into town these days that the feds are about to put a bounty on them. Do you know why, Ms. Bridges?” he asked, suddenly icily formal.

  “Why are coyotes and bobcats coming into town,” she countered, “or why is the government about to put a bounty on them?”

  Jesse set his back teeth, thought of his cousin Keegan for no reason he could have explained, and deliberately relaxed his jaws. “Wild animals are being driven farther out of their natural habitat every day,” he said. “By people like you. They’ve got to be somewhere, damn it.”

  “Which do you care more about, Mr. McKettrick? People or animals?”

  “Depends,” Jesse said. “I’ve known people who could learn scruples from a rabid badger. And it’s not as if building more condominiums is a service to humanity. Most of them are a blight on the land—and they all look alike, too. Stucco boxes, stacked on top of each other. What’s that about?”

  Cheyenne picked up her spoon, made a halfhearted swipe at her soup. Straightened her spine. “I’d be glad to show you the blueprints,” she said. “Our project is designed to blend gracefully into the landscape, with minimal impact on the environment.”

  Jesse eyed his cheeseburger regretfully. All those additives and preservatives going to waste, not to mention a lot of perfectly good grease. “No deal,” he said. With anybody else, he’d have played out the hand, let her believe he was interested in selling, just to see what came of it. Cheyenne Bridges was different, and that was the most disturbing element of all.

  Why was she different?

  “Just let me show you the plans,” she persisted.

  “Just let me show you the land,” he retorted.

  She smiled. “I’ll let you show me yours,” she bargained, “if you’ll let me show you mine.”

  He laughed. “You sure are persistent,” he said.

  “You sure are stubborn,” she answered.

  Jesse reached for his cheeseburger. By that time, he’d had ample opportunity to notice that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  “You ever get married?” he asked.

  She seemed to welcome the change of subject, though the quiet, bruised vigilance was still there in her eyes and the set of her shoulders and the way she held her head. “No,” she said. “You?”

  “No,” he told her. He and Brandi, a rodeo groupie, had been married by an Elvis in Las Vegas, come to their senses before word had got out, and agreed to divorce an hour after they’d checked out of the hotel. They’d parted friends, and he hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, though she hit him up for a few hundred dollars every now and then, and he always sent the money.

  As far as he was concerned, he’d answered honestly. Brandi slipped out of his mind as quickly as she’d slipped in.

  Meanwhile, he’d only taken a couple of bites of the sandwich, but the patty was thick and goopy with cheese, and protein always centered him—especially when he’d been playing cards all day, subsisting on the cold cereal he’d had for breakfast after doing the chores on the ranch. Sure enough, it was the burger that lifted his spirits.

  Sure enough, said a voice in his head, you’re full of sheep dip.

  It’s the woman.

  “How’s the soup?” he asked.

  “Cold,” she said. “How’s the burger?”

  He grinned. “It’s clogging my arteries even as we speak.”

  Cheyenne lifted one eyebrow, but she was smiling. “And that’s good?”

  “Probably not,” he said. “But it tastes great.”

  After that, the conversation was relatively easy.

  They finished their meal, Jesse paid the bill, and Cheyenne left the tip.

  He walked her to her car. There was virtually no crime in Indian Rock, but that kind of courtesy was bred into him, like opening doors and carrying heavy things.

  “You’ll really look at the plans?” she asked quietly, her eyes luminous, once she was behind the wheel.

  “If you’ll look at the land,” Jesse reminded her. “Come up to the ranch tomorrow, around nine o’clock. I’ll be through feeding the horses around then.”

  She nodded. A pulse fluttered at the base of her throat. “I’ll bring the blueprints,” she said.

  “Please,” he said, with mock enthusiasm, “bring the blueprints.”

  She laughed and moved to close the car door. “Thanks for supper, Jesse.”

  He went to tug at the brim of his hat, then remembered he’d left it inside the Roadhouse. “My pleasure,” he said, feeling awkward for the first time in recent memory.

  He watched as Cheyenne started the car, backed out and drove away. Ordinarily, he’d have gone back to Lucky’s to play a few more hands of cards, but that night, he just wanted to go home.

  He went back into the Roadhouse, reclaimed his hat.

  Roselle invited him to a party at her place.

  If her eyes had been hands, he’d have been stripped naked, right there in the Roadhouse. Clearly, the “party” she had in mind would include the two of them and nobody else.

  He said some other time, adding a mental “maybe.”

  Back in his truck, he adjusted the rearview mirror and looked into his own eyes. Who are you? he asked silently. And what have you done with Jesse McKettrick?

  “I COMPLETELY BLEW IT,” Cheyenne told her mother the moment she stepped into the house that night.

  Ayanna sat on the old couch, her feet resting bare on the cool linoleum floor, crocheting something from multi-strands of variegated yarn. “How so?” she asked mildly.

  The sounds of cyber-battle bounced in from the next room. Mitch was playing a video game on his laptop. Mitch was always playing a video game on his laptop. It was as though by shooting down animated enemies he could keep his own demons at bay.

  “Jesse flatly refused to sell me the land,” Cheyenne said.

  Ayanna smiled softly. “You expected that.”

  Cheyenne tossed her heavy handbag onto a chair, kicked off her shoes and sighed with relief. “Yeah,” she said.

  “Want something to eat?” Ayanna asked. “Mitch and I had mac-and-cheese.”

  “I had soup,” Cheyenne said.

  Her cell phone played its elevator song inside her bag.

  “Ignore it,” Ayanna advised.

  “I can’t,” Cheyenne answered. She fished out the phone, flipped it open and said, “Hello, Nigel.”

  “Have you made any progress?” Nigel asked.

  Cheyenne looked at her watch. “Gosh, Nigel. You’ve shown amazing restraint. It’s been at least an hour and a half since the last time you called.”

  “You said you were on your way to have dinner with McKettrick,” Nigel reminded her. They’d talked, live via satellite, during the drive between Lucky’s and the Roadhouse. “How did it go?”

  Ayanna sat serenely, crocheting away.

  “He said no,” Cheyenne reported.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “We’re doomed.”

  “Take a breath, Nigel. He agreed to look at the plans—on one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “I have to look at the land. Tomorrow morning. I’m meeting him at his place at 9:00 a.m.”

  “So we’re still in the running?”

  “Anybody’s guess,” Cheyenne said wearily, moving her purse to sink into the chair herself. “Jesse’s direct, if nothing else, and as soon as he knew what I wanted, he dug in his heels.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have sprung it on him so soon,” Nigel mused. Cheyenne could just see her boss’s bushy brows knitting together in a thoughtful frown. She wondered if he’d ever considered investing in a weed eater, for
purposes of personal grooming.

  “You didn’t give me any other choice, remember?”

  “Don’t make this my fault.”

  “You’ve been breathing down my neck since I got off the plane in Phoenix yesterday morning. If you want me to do the impossible, Nigel, you’ve got to give me some space.”

  “You can do this, can’t you, Cheyenne?”

  She felt a surge of shaky confidence. “I specialize in the impossible,” she said.

  “Come through for me, babe,” Nigel wheedled.

  “Don’t call me babe,” Cheyenne responded. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother smile. “And don’t bug me, either. When I have something to tell you, I’ll be in touch—”

  “But—”

  “Goodbye, Nigel.” Cheyenne thumbed the end button.

  Sounds of intense warfare burgeoned from Mitch’s room.

  With another sigh, Cheyenne tossed the cell phone onto a dust-free end table and rose from her chair. “You know something, Mom?” she said, brightening. “You’re amazing. You’ve been in this house for a few hours, and already it feels like home.”

  Ayanna’s eyes glittered with a sudden sheen of tears. “I want to do my part, Cheyenne,” she said. “I know you think you’re in this alone, but you’re not. You have me, and you have Mitch.”

  Cheyenne’s throat knotted up. When she spoke, her voice came out as a croak. “Speaking of Mitch—”

  Ayanna set aside her crochet project and stood, pointed herself in the direction of the kitchen, which, unlike those in the condos Cheyenne and Nigel planned to build, boasted none of the modern conveniences. “I’ll make you some herbal tea,” Ayanna said. “Might help you sleep.”

  “Thanks,” Cheyenne said and crossed to push open the partially closed door to her brother’s room.

  Mitch sat hunched over his computer, a refurbished model, bought with money Ayanna had probably saved from the checks Cheyenne sent every payday. He seemed so slight and fragile, slouched in his wheelchair, with a card table for a desk. Once, he’d been athletic. One of the most popular kids in school.

  “Hey,” Cheyenne said.

  “Hey,” Mitch responded without looking away from the laptop screen.

  She considered mussing his hair, the way she’d done when he was younger, before the accident, and decided against the idea. Mitch was nineteen now, and his dignity was about all he had left.

  When the deal was done, she reminded herself, she’d buy him a real computer, like the one she’d seen at McKettrickCo when she’d stopped in looking for Jesse earlier that day. Maybe then he’d start hoping again.

  “I wish we could go back to Phoenix,” he said.

  She sat down on his bed. Ayanna had brought his blankets and spread from home, put them on the rollaway that had been old when Cheyenne had left for college. Oh, yes, Ayanna had tried, but the room was depressing, just the same. The wallpaper was peeling, and the curtains looked as though they’d been through at least one flood. The linoleum floor was scuffed, with the pattern worn away in several places.

  “What’s in Phoenix?” she asked lightly, though she knew. In the low-income housing where he and Ayanna lived, he’d had friends. He’d had cable TV, and there was a major library across from the apartment building, with computers. Here, he had an old laptop and a rollaway bed.

  Mitch merely shrugged, but he shut down the game and swiveled his chair around so he could face Cheyenne.

  “Things are gonna get better,” she said.

  “That’s what Mom says, too,” Mitch replied, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  Cheyenne studied her brother. She and Mitch had different fathers; hers was dead, his was God knew where. Ten years ago, when she’d left Indian Rock, he’d been nine and she’d been seventeen. When Ayanna had followed her second husband, Pete, to Phoenix, dragging Mitch along with her, Cheyenne had been in her sophomore year at the University of Arizona, scrambling to keep up her grades and hold on to her night job. Mitch had written her a plaintive letter, begging her to come home, so the two of them could stay in this rundown shack of a house. He’d loved Indian Rock then—loved the singular freedoms of growing up in a small town.

  She’d replied with a postcard, scrawled on her break at Hooters, telling him to get real. She wasn’t about to come back, and even if she did, Ayanna would never agree to let them live alone, with Gram gone. You’ll like Phoenix, she’d said.

  “I’m sorry, Mitch,” she said now, after swallowing her heart. It was true that Ayanna wouldn’t have let her children stay there, if only because she’d needed the pittance she’d received for renting the place out, but there were gentler ways of refusing.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “Everything,” she answered.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Mitch told her. “The accident, I mean.”

  I could have come back, gotten a job at the Roadhouse or Lucky’s, waiting tables. I could have paid Ayanna some rent, and probably gotten something from the state to help with the cost of raising my little brother. If I’d even tried…

  “It wouldn’t have happened if we’d been here,” she said.

  “Who knows?” he asked. “Maybe it was fate—maybe I’d have rolled that four-wheeler anyhow.”

  Cheyenne closed her eyes against the images that were always hovering at the edge of her consciousness: Mitch, sixteen and foolish, joyriding in the desert with friends on “four-wheelers”—all-terrain vehicles designed for the hopelessly reckless. The rollover and critical spine injury. The rush to the hospital after her mother’s frantic call, the long vigil in the waiting room outside Intensive Care, when nobody knew if Mitch would live or die.

  The surgeries.

  The slow, excruciating recovery.

  Cheyenne had been just starting to make a name for herself at Meerland then. She’d driven back and forth between San Diego and Phoenix, armed with a company laptop and a cell phone. She’d held on stubbornly and worked hard, determined to prove to Nigel that she could succeed.

  And she had. While spelling an exhausted Ayanna at the hospital—Pete, husband number two and Mitch’s dad, had fled when he’d realized he was expected to behave like a responsible adult—she’d struck up a friendship with one of her brother’s surgeons and had eventually persuaded him to invest in Meerland. When his profits were impressive, he’d brought several of his colleagues onboard.

  Mitch had gradually gotten better, until he was well enough to leave the hospital, and Cheyenne had gone back to San Diego and thrown all her energies into her job.

  “Do you think we could get a dog?”

  Cheyenne blinked. Returned to the here-and-now with a thump. “A dog?”

  Mitch smiled, and that was such a rare thing that it made her heart skitter over a beat. “We couldn’t have one at the apartment,” he said.

  “But you’ll be going back—”

  “I’m never going back,” Mitch said with striking certainty.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “We don’t have to pay rent here,” he answered. “Mom’s talking about painting again, and getting a job waiting tables or selling souvenirs someplace. She’ll probably meet some loser and make it her life’s mission to save him from himself.”

  For all her intelligence, Ayanna had the kind of romantic history that would provide material for a week of Dr. Phil episodes. At least she hadn’t married again after Pete.

  Tears burned in Cheyenne’s eyes, and she was glad the room was lit only by Mitch’s computer screen and the tacky covered-wagon lamp on the dresser.

  “I wish—” Mitch began when Cheyenne didn’t, couldn’t, speak, but his voice fell away.

  “What, Mitch?” she asked, after swallowing hard. “What do you wish?”

  “I wish I could have a job, and a girlfriend. I wish I could ride a horse.”

  Cheyenne didn’t know what to say. Jobs were few and far between in Indian Rock, especially for the disabled. Girls Mitch’s age
were working, going to college, dating men who could take them places. And riding horses? That was for people with two good legs and more courage than good sense.

  “Isn’t there something else?” she said, almost whispering.

  Mitch smiled sadly, turned away again and brought the war game back up on his computer screen. Blip-blip-kabang.

  Cheyenne sat helplessly on the bed for a few moments, then got to her feet, laid a hand briefly on her brother’s shoulder, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  THE HEADLIGHTS OF JESSE’S truck swept across the old log schoolhouse his great-great-great grandfather, Jeb McKettrick, had built for his teacher bride, Chloe. Jesse’s sisters had used the place as a playhouse when they were kids, and Jesse, being a decade younger, had made a fort of it. Now, on the rare occasions when his parents came back to the ranch, it served as an office.

  He pulled up beside the barn, and the motion lights came on.

  Inside, he checked on the horses, six of them altogether, though the number varied. They’d been fed and turned out for some exercise that morning, before he’d left for town, but he added flakes of dried Bermuda grass to their feeders now just the same, to make up for being gone so long.

  They were forgiving, like always, and grateful for the attention he gave them.

  He took the time to groom them, one by one, but eventually, there was nothing to do but face that empty house.

  It was big; generations of McKettricks had added on to it—a room here, a story there. Now that his folks spent the majority of their time in Palm Beach, playing golf and socializing, and Victoria and Sarah were busy jet-setting with their wealthy husbands, Jesse was the unofficial owner.

  He entered through the kitchen door, switched on the lights.

  The house his cousins, Meg and Sierra, owned was reportedly haunted. Jesse often wished this one was, too, because at least then he wouldn’t have been alone.

  He went to the walk-in Sub-Zero, took out a beer and popped the top. What he ought to do was get a dog, but he was gone too much. It wouldn’t be fair to consign some poor unsuspecting mutt to a lonely life, just so he could come home to somebody who’d always be happy to see him.

  “You’re losing it, McKettrick,” he said aloud.