Spring at Saddle Run

by Delores Fossen

  Her heart went to her knees.

  And she blurted out the really bad word.

  “The name is Ella McCann,” Millie managed to say when she got her mouth unfrozen.

  The room went tombstone-silent, but Millie figured there was already some mental gossip going on.

  Frankie jumped to her feet. “I volunteer as tribute,” she repeated.

  Millie considered taking her up on the offer. Considered shirking the duty that had been drummed into her since childhood. Parkman duty. Parkman pride. But it was more than that. It was spine. It would probably come as a surprise to many, but she did indeed have one. And Millie was about to prove that.

  To them.

  To herself.

  Even if Ella McCann deserved each and every f-bomb that Millie would ever mutter, she’d do this. She’d research the “other” woman. She’d dig into the life of the woman who’d died in the arms of Millie’s husband.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SAYING A WORD that would require him to put a dollar in the swear jar, Joe McCann sat back on the barn floor and frowned at the calf he’d just pulled from the still-grunting cow. The cow, a registered Red Angus with some pretty impressive bloodlines, turned her head and aimed a bovine eye at her newest offspring.

  A white bull calf.

  White.

  A big one, too. Joe figured it’d tip the scales at a hundred pounds which was why the cow had needed Joe’s help with the delivery.

  “Got something you want to tell me?” Joe asked the cow. According to her ear tag, she was number eighty-four, but Joe called her Cowlick because of the way bits of her hair stuck up on her head.

  Mentally thumbing back to the breeding spreadsheet he kept, Cowlick had been in the back east pasture with bull number three, who was also a registered Red Angus with an equally impressive bloodline.

  Joe figured it was projecting on his part, but Cowlick seemed to look somewhat embarrassed about the lack of red coloring for her bouncing baby boy. Then again, maybe she was just blushing over the recollection of being covered by two bulls in the span of just a couple of days. Both the number three Red Angus and a white Charolais bull that had almost certainly broken fence from a neighbor’s pasture.

  Clearly, the white Charolais with a questionable lineage had won out in this particular gene pool battle, and his victory would play hell to havoc with the ranch’s reputation. Saddle Run Ranch might be small, but the whole notion of being one hundred percent Red Angus registered meant something to him.

  Then again, plenty of things that’d once meant something no longer did.

  And, cursing, that was all the pity party he was going to allow himself today.

  Joe’s phone dinged with a text again. Which he ignored, again. His hands were covered with afterbirth that he didn’t want on his phone. Besides, the only person he’d actually want to take a text from—his thirteen-year-old daughter, Dara—was in the house. If she needed to talk to him, she could walk the twenty yards or so to the barn or call out from the porch.

  When Cowlick started cleaning her baby boy, Joe got up from the barn floor. He would have lingered a few moments, watching cow and calf get to know each other, but he heard something else that had him frowning. Not a ding from a text but the sound of an approaching vehicle.

  Hell.

  He checked his watch. It was a little after seven, not a time for unexpected visitors. Figuring it was one of the teenage boys who’d been sniffing around Dara, Joe didn’t bother cleaning up. However, he did grab an axe from the tack room. He might be fairly new at the whole “father of a teenage daughter” thing, but axes tended to send a solid message.

  And that message was—I’ll chop off your dick if you try to dick around with my child.

  Of course, he wouldn’t actually resort to that sort of thing. Probably not, anyway. But it didn’t hurt for the boys to believe he would.

  Propping the axe on his shoulder, Joe walked to the front of the house just as his visitor was getting out of his truck. Not a teenage boy though, but rather Tanner Parkman.

  There’d been a time, say about seven years ago, when Joe had wanted to do some dick chopping on the bad boy Tanner. That’d been about the time Tanner had knocked up Joe’s kid sister, Frankie. But Tanner and Frankie had ended up getting married. For a short time, anyway. And they’d had a kid. Joe’s one and only nephew.

  While Tanner still had some of his bad boy ways, he was also doing the dad thing well enough, along with running the town’s only motorcycle repair shop. Of course, a business like that didn’t live up to the silver-spoon standards for Tanner’s family, but it seemed to make Tanner happy enough.

  Little T, aka Tanner Larkin Parkman Jr., got out from the other side of the truck, slamming the door behind him and making a beeline for Joe.

  “You got an axe,” Little T announced with all the enthusiasm of a six-year-old on a sugar high. Little T was as blond as the moon, had a spattering of freckles over his nose and jumped and wiggled when he talked. “Can I have it?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, “when you’re thirty and eleven feet tall. Are you thirty and eleven feet tall?”

  Little T considered that a moment and gave Joe a sheepish look similar to the one the cow had. “I soon will be.”

  “Then, you can come back for the axe,” Joe assured him, and he turned his attention to Tanner. “You can’t have the axe, either, but I’m guessing you’re here to ask Dara to babysit. If so, she’s inside.”

  “Thanks, but I came about something else.” Tanner looked at him as if waiting for that something else to magically appear, and then he glanced at Joe’s shirt and jeans. “Did you just pull a calf?”

  “Yeah.” Which meant he probably stank if Tanner could pick up on what he’d been doing. “Sore subject though so don’t ask to see it.”

  That seemed to intrigue Tanner a little, but then he shook his head. “Nobody’s got in touch with you yet?”

  “About what?” Joe thought about the text dings he’d heard, and he got a bad feeling.

  “Son of a monkey,” Tanner grumbled. A dad substitute for what Tanner frequently used to say. Still did say it sometimes when he forgot. “Tonight was the quarterly meeting of the Last Ride Society...”

  His words trailed off as a car turned into Joe’s driveway. He shifted the axe in case this was a teenage boy, but he soon saw it wasn’t. Tanner’s sister, Millie, was behind the wheel, and she brought the pricey but conservative-looking gray Lexus to a slow stop behind her brother’s truck.

  And some puzzle pieces fell into place for Joe.

  Hell’s Texas bells.

  He hoped this was a really bad joke.

  Even though Millie and he lived in the same small town, it’d been months since Joe had laid eyes on her. Of course, he’d dodged a couple of potential encounters by simply turning around and going home when he’d seen her. Added to that, he never went within two blocks of her shop. Joe bet she’d done her own share of dodging him, too.

  Millie stepped out of her car and gave Joe a tentative smile. She had the moon-blond hair deal, too, and the Parkman blue eyes like Little T’s. Ditto for the spattering of freckles, but she covered hers up with makeup.

  “Aunt Millie!” Little T squealed, and he bolted toward her. “Uncle Joe says I can have the axe when I’m tall and old. He might give it to you though so you can give it to me.”

  “Are you saying I’m old and tall?” she asked, giving the kid an exaggerated beady eye.

  Little T’s forehead bunched up, and he was obviously trying to come up with the right answer. “Sort of,” he settled for saying. Joe figured in Little T’s mind Millie’s five-eight height was indeed tallish, and since she wasn’t a kid, she’d fall into his definition of old.

  Millie shrugged. “Fair enough, but dream on, kid. I’m not getting the axe for you.”

  But she
leaned down and gave him a noisy kiss on the top of his head. Then, she followed it with a hug that was warm, long and filled with love. Love that definitely wasn’t in her eyes when they turned back in Joe’s direction.

  “Tanner told you?” she asked.

  “No—” Tanner started.

  Joe interrupted him. “I’m guessing you drew Ella’s name at the Last Ride Society.”

  Millie nodded. No love in those blue eyes now. Just a bone-deep sadness that Joe totally got. Of course, there was always sadness on those rare occasions when they saw each other. Sadness. A squirming unease.

  And questions.

  Always questions.

  Joe was reasonably sure that Millie didn’t have any more answers than he did as to why her husband had been in the fatal car wreck with his wife.

  “Heard you cussed in front of the Last Ride Society,” Tanner said to her, maybe to break the squirming uneasiness. Or the sadness. “Is that true?”

  Dragging in a deep breath, Millie seemed to steel herself. “True. It rhymes with duck.”

  Joe nearly cursed in surprise. As her nickname Millie Vanilla indicated, she wasn’t the cursing-in-public sort. She was as quiet and concealed as her freckles. He figured some of his unread texts would be about the drawing. Some would be about the duck-rhyming curse word.

  “Did birds really poop on your spoon?” Little T asked her, tugging at the sleeve of her pale blue shirt.

  She took another of those breaths. “Not mine exactly but a spoon in the shop. And they trashed my stash of Jolly Ranchers. They cracked them with their beaks and spit them out.”

  Little T shook his head in disgust. “Son of a monkey. That’s not right,” he exclaimed. Like father, like son. But Joe hoped that in about ten years or so, his nephew wouldn’t continue the traditions of his daddy’s bad boy ways.

  The three adults volleyed glances at each other. Awkward ones. Tanner obviously picked up on it and scooped up Little T. “Let’s head home and start getting you ready for bed.”

  That went over about as well as Joe knew it would. Little T did lots of groaning and protesting as he made his goodbyes and got back in the truck with his dad.

  Joe and Millie waved. Waited for the truck to pull out of the driveway. Then, waited some more. And yeah, this awkwardness kicked up a whole bunch of notches.

  “Are you auditioning for a role in a horror movie?” she asked, breaking the silence. She tipped her head toward his shoulder, then his torso. “Axe. Covered with gunk.”

  “It’s a deterrent for any boy who might come to visit Dara.”

  She nodded. “It could work.”

  And with small talk apparently exhausted, the silence came again. For a couple of seconds, the only sounds were a buzzing of a mosquito and Millie slapping at it. Where there was one mosquito, more would certainly follow, so Joe hoped she’d put a quick end to this visit.

  She reached in her pocket, pulled out a folded paper and handed it to him. “That’s the handout to explain what I’m supposed to do for the tombstone research. I stopped by my office and made you a copy.”

  Joe groaned, wadded it into a ball and stuck it in his pocket. It’d go in the trash first chance he got.

  “You could say no,” he told Millie. “You could tell the Last Ride Society to duck it.”

  The corners of her mouth lifted in a smile that didn’t make it to her eyes. “I could, but it’d be easier if I just got it done.”

  He groaned and set down the axe so he could prop his hand on the handle. “It’d be easier if you just didn’t do it at all. Why the hell would you want to do it?” he added in a snarl.

  She sighed, kicked the axe blade. “Haven’t you heard? I’m the good girl. The one who always does what she’s supposed to do. I’m Millie Vanilla.”

  “You cursed in front of the Last Ride Society,” he pointed out.

  “Well, I slip every now and then. Trust me, I’ll pay for it,” she muttered.

  Yeah, she probably would. Her mother was hell on wheels when it came to being a proper Parkman. Laurie Jean would definitely prefer Millie Vanilla to her only daughter cursing in the town hall.

  “If I don’t do it, someone else will,” Millie said. “Probably Frankie since she volunteered.”

  Joe cursed, not going with the duck version, either, which meant he now needed to put two dollars in the swear jar.

  “Don’t blame Frankie,” Millie added. “She knew how hard this would be and wanted to spare me. But she can’t spare me. If I pass this on to someone else, then there’ll still be talk because everyone will know it was too hard for me to do. That I’m just as wounded and hurt as I was twenty-two months ago.”

  “Aren’t you just as wounded and hurt?” And he immediately wished he hadn’t asked. Because he already knew the answer.

  This was why he avoided Millie. Why he avoided talking about Ella, period.

  “Yes,” Millie softly admitted. She whirled around, looking at the barn instead of at him. “I’ll always be hurt. Always be wounded. But the poor-pitiful-Millie looks and mutters of ‘Bless your heart’ will be worse than me just getting it done.”

  Joe wasn’t so sure of that at all. Then again, his scowl usually took care of any pitying looks. “You’ll trade mutters of ‘Bless your heart’ for back pats of ‘Brave little soldier.’”

  Her sigh was long, deep and acknowledged that he was right. “I’m not going to dig deep in certain areas,” Millie went on. “Nothing about the last twenty-four hours of her life. Ella’s life,” she emphasized, and she’d said his wife’s name as if it were a hunk of jagged glass stuck in her throat.

  Joe would probably experience the same sensation if he ever said her husband’s name aloud. But he had no plans for that. No plans to drag all of this muck out into the open again.

  “If you’re here to ask for my help with the research, my answer is no,” Joe spelled out.

  Her nod was quick as if that was the exact response she’d expected. “I understand. I just didn’t want you or your daughter to be blindsided by the talk this will stir up.”

  It was the mention of Dara that stopped him cold. Millie hadn’t said it in the same hunk-of-glass tone but with a Texas-sized amount of concern. Shit. Dara would indeed hear about the drawing, and it’d bring it all to the surface for her. And Millie was right—that would happen whether or not she did the research. This particular son of a monkey was already out of the bag.

  “I’ll talk to Dara,” he said, and he let that stand as a goodbye. Joe turned to head back to the barn to ditch the axe.

  Just as Cowlick and the bull calf came moseying out.

  The sun might be close to setting, but there was still plenty of light for him, and Millie, to see the pair. The colors were an even starker contrast now that Cowlick had cleaned her boy up a bit.

  “Bet there’s a story behind that,” she murmured.

  Joe stood there and waited until he heard Millie go back to her car. Until she drove away. Then, he cursed twenty dollars’ worth, counting off each of the words that only the mosquitos could hear. He gave himself a moment before he herded Cowlick and the calf back inside the barn. He put the axe back in the tack room, and this time, he remembered to shut the barn door.

  If only he could fix his life as easily.

  He glanced at the lights in the house. Dara was still in her bedroom, probably doing her homework or watching TV. They’d had an early dinner and already cleaned up the dishes because of Cowlick’s labor so there was nothing left to do in the kitchen. Deciding his gunked-up clothes could wait, too, he headed to his man-shed.

  When Joe had bought the ranch ten years earlier, it’d been just that. A shed. But he’d added insulation, flooring, even heat and AC so Ella could use the space to play around with her hobby—painting. Since he didn’t have any hobbies, Joe used the shed for, well, thinking and broo
ding. Probably not a wise use, but it was what it was. He didn’t want to brood inside the house where Dara might see him. She had enough of her own pain and grief without adding his to the mix.

  Some of the pictures that Ella had painted were hanging unframed on the walls. So was the sign she’d hung over her easel. La La Land. Not a complete joke since she was oblivious to everything around her when she got caught up in a painting.

  Normally, Joe would look at the artwork and try to remember that his life hadn’t always been about dealing with the aftermath of her death.

  He didn’t do that tonight.

  First, he scrubbed his hands in the small half bath and pulled a twenty and two ones from his wallet. He shoved them into the swear jar on the worktable. Then, he snagged a beer from the dorm-sized fridge and sank down into the recliner he’d moved in a couple of months earlier. It was ratty, stained and worn which made it an appropriate chair for a man-shed, and he sat there to study a different picture. Not on the wall but rather the one in his head.

  The one of Ella and him on their wedding day thirteen and a half years ago.

  No church wedding but rather vows exchanged at a justice of the peace. Mercy, they’d been young. Ella barely twenty-one and him twenty-three. Ella had worn a yellow dress that was only a few shades darker than her hair, and she’d been happy. Her smile in that mental photo was a mile wide, and there had practically been little cartoon hearts coming from her eyes when she looked at him. She’d been in love and thrilled to the bone that she was already three months pregnant with their “love child” as she’d called Dara.

  There were times, like now, that Joe wished the image in his head wasn’t there. That he could erase it and latch on to another one—like six months later when Ella was cradling a newborn Dara at the hospital. But that particular picture stayed firmly in Dara’s baby book, not in his head.

  Cursing another five dollars’ worth, he lifted open the arm storage on the recliner. A spot meant for a TV remote, but that’s where Joe kept the receipt from a grocery store in nearby San Antonio. The one Ella had used to scribble out the note she’d left for him.