Big Sky Wedding

by Linda Lael Miller

  This time, Brylee smiled without effort, nodded. “I’ll do my best to draw your sister into the conversation,” she promised. “Give me five minutes to wash up and feed Snidely, and I’ll join you.”

  Shane, having accomplished his mission, grinned again and went out the same way he’d come in.

  Once the door closed behind him, Brylee sighed and rolled her eyes heavenward, but she wasn’t really exasperated. In fact, a part of her rejoiced at the prospect of sharing a meal with the rest of the Parrish clan.

  She’d been lonely lately—she could admit that now.

  Not out loud, of course. Just to herself. But that was progress, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  THE FIRST CROP of contractors showed up at Hangman’s Bend bright and early the next morning, clipboards in hand, retractable tape measures at the ready, expressions serious and businesslike as Cleo shepherded them from room to room, explaining what she wanted done—which was amazingly specific, in Zane’s opinion. She had it figured out right down to the style of fixtures for the bathrooms and the color of each and every wall.

  Looking on in amused silence, Zane marveled at her energy and the quick certainty in her voice. He’d figured out that the floors ought to be replaced, and the kitchen brought into the twenty-first century—the room had skipped the twentieth entirely—but that was as far as it went. He hadn’t thought about furniture at all, except to acknowledge that they’d need some, but Cleo seemed to have her mind made up about couches and chairs, tables and lamps and the like.

  He was more than willing to let the woman have her way.

  Nash, meanwhile, sat at the rickety card table in the center of the bomb-zone kitchen, spooning cereal from his bowl and then putting it back before it got to his mouth.

  “What’s the problem?” Zane asked mildly, watching his younger brother and sipping coffee from one of the six mugs they’d bought the night before, on the shopping expedition to Three Trees.

  “It’s boring around here,” Nash complained. He glanced down at Slim, who was waiting for him to finish breakfast, and idly stroked the animal’s head. When he went on, his voice was quiet. “I can’t even get a game of fetch going with this dumb old dog. I throw the stick and throw the stick, and he won’t chase it. He just sits there until I go get it myself.”

  Zane hid a grin behind the rim of his mug. He guessed the charm of the new TV must have worn off already—not that he would have suggested, let alone allowed, the boy to hole up in his room and watch the tube on a fine day like that one.

  “I was thinking we could drive around a little,” Zane said. “Maybe make a run over to check Parable out, or scout up some good places to go fishing.”

  Nash looked cautiously hopeful. “You and me and Cleo?” he asked.

  Zane chuckled. “Cleo is busy becoming America’s Next Top Decorator, and I’d as soon poke at a rattlesnake with a short stick as interrupt her now, with her in her element and all. Nope, it’ll just be you and me.” The dog looked back at him then, as if to make it known that he wanted to go along. “And Slim,” he finished.

  Nash’s grin was sudden and somehow surprising, a dramatic switch, given the sullen mood he’d been in since he got out of bed. Twenty minutes before, he’d wandered into the kitchen wearing nothing but the oversize flannel boxers he’d slept in, started riffling through bags and boxes looking for food and grumbled under his breath when Cleo told him to go back to his room and get himself dressed like a civilized human being with a place in polite company.

  He’d followed orders, all right, but he’d been sour as last week’s cottage cheese when he got back, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, socks and sneakers.

  Now, though, Nash practically broke his neck to carry his bowl and spoon over to the one remaining counter, next to the sink, with its exposed pipes and rusty faucet handles, setting them down with a thump.

  “Can I feed Blackjack?” he asked eagerly, already on his way to the door.

  “I already did that,” Zane said, leaving his mug beside Nash’s breakfast bowl. “First rule of ranching, little brother—no sleeping in half the day while the livestock waits for hay and fresh water.”

  Nash executed a crisp salute. “Yes, sir!” he said, grinning.

  Zane resisted an urge to muss up the kid’s hair, just for the heck of it. “Go tell Cleo we’ll be out for a while,” he told the boy. “I’ll start up the truck.”

  For once, Nash didn’t offer a comeback—he just followed the sound of Cleo’s voice into the next room.

  Zane and Slim went outside, and Zane hoisted the dog into the backseat of the rig.

  Maybe they’d stop at the courthouse over in Parable and get old Slim licensed, he decided, make sure the mutt was legal.

  He’d barely climbed behind the wheel when Nash burst out of the house, leaped right over the porch steps without touching down on any of them and sprinted across the yard toward the truck.

  Cleo’s voice rang out behind him. “Didn’t I tell you not to slam that screen door, Nash Sutton?”

  Nash ducked slightly, as though he expected her to hurl something at the back of his head, and then scrambled, grinning, into the passenger seat. While he was fastening his seat belt, Slim leaned forward and licked the kid’s face in welcome.

  Nash laughed, turning just far enough to give one of Slim’s floppy ears a gentle tug. “Stupid dog,” he said, with obvious affection.

  Slim panted, happy that the gang was all there, and sat back to take in the scenery.

  “I never had a dog,” Nash remarked as they passed the mailbox at the bottom of the dirt driveway. “We moved around too much, but Dad promised I could have one someday.”

  Zane’s throat tightened. Someday was Jess Sutton’s favorite word. Not that “someday” ever actually rolled around.

  “That so,” he said, watching the boy out of the corner of his eye. No cars had gone by since he’d gotten up soon after sunrise, but he looked in both directions, then looked again, before pulling out onto the county road.

  “How come you don’t like him?” Nash asked. There was no challenge in his tone, no petulance—just curiosity. Slim made a scrabbling sound as he rebalanced himself on the backseat after the turn. “Dad, I mean?”

  Zane hesitated. “I don’t know him well enough to have an opinion, one way or the other,” he finally replied. He couldn’t avoid the subject of their father forever, he knew, and the kid wasn’t going to stop asking until he got answers and made sense of them.

  “How can that be?” Nash wanted to know. A glance in his direction showed he was genuinely confused.

  Ask him, Zane might have said, but he didn’t. “Landry and I didn’t see much of the old man, growing up,” he said, shifting from first gear to second and choosing his words carefully. Keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead on the winding, rutted road that wouldn’t turn to blacktop until less than a mile outside Three Trees. He cherished a brief and futile hope that the kid would let the topic drop, but, naturally, he didn’t.

  “Dad told me that your mom left him in the middle of the night and took you and Landry with her,” Nash said matter-of-factly. “He looked everywhere for you, but it was a couple of years before he caught up.”

  Zane suppressed a ragged sigh, and it swelled inside him, hurting like a gulp of beer that had gone down the wrong pipe. It probably didn’t help that he’d swallowed what he wanted almost desperately to say in reply—Did Dad happen to mention that he’d been gone for three days when Mom finally loaded us into her old car, along with most of our clothes, some of our toys and every edible scrap left in the refrigerator? Did he tell you he was shacked up the whole time with some woman he met in a bar, and that wasn’t the first time he’d cheated?

  “That’s his story, huh?” he asked instead. Admittedly, the remark was a mite on the snarky side, but it was also the best he could do right then, remembering, as he was, how many times that rusted-out wreck of a station wagon had broken down on some lonely highway, how the food, w
hich didn’t amount to much in the first place, ran out the second day.

  In the backseat, Slim gave a whimper that sounded strangely cautionary.

  “Are you saying Dad lied?” Nash asked, but he still didn’t fly mad or even raise his voice. His tone was conversational, if a touch on the sad side.

  Zane cleared his throat, spared his brother a glance, turned his attention back to the road ahead. “He did catch up with us,” he said, after a few moments of grim self-control. Eventually, he clarified, in the privacy of his own head. Then he went on, because he had to give Nash something, didn’t he? “We were staying with Mom’s dad and stepmother back then, on the outskirts of Tucson—Mom was between jobs, and she hadn’t had much luck finding work—and one morning, as if out of nowhere, Dad turned up at the front door.” Zane paused again, chafing at the way his father had grinned and spread his arms in a sweeping here-I-am kind of gesture, evidently expecting a warm welcome, even though better than two years had gone by without so much as a letter, let alone a check for child support. As it turned out, he’d hitchhiked all the way from New Mexico, where they’d all lived before the breakup, to Arizona. He didn’t have a car, even the dimmest prospect of a job or a plug nickel in his pocket.

  “What happened?” Nash pressed. “I’ll bet you were glad to see him.”

  They were approaching Three Trees now, and Zane was relieved to swap the hard-dirt roadway for solid asphalt.

  Glad to see him? Not really.

  Zane might have cut loose with a chuckle, raw as his throat felt, but even after all these years, it hurt to look back on that day. They’d loved their father, he and Landry, but young as they were, they’d long since shed any illusion that the man would change. In fact, Zane suspected their mom had held out hope that Jess would come looking for his family, gather them up and, well, do all the things he hadn’t done before.

  “My grandfather gave him some money, bought him a bus ticket and said he’d be wise not to come back.” Zane’s voice sounded hollow in his own ears when he finally spoke.

  “Did Dad try to talk to you and Landry or anything? Where was your mom at the time?”

  Zane slowed way down as they cruised along the main street of Three Trees. “She was out looking for work that day,” he allowed. “Got herself hired on at a burger joint. The job didn’t pay much, but she was all excited when she got home.”

  He recalled the look of hope that had overtaken Maddie Rose’s face and then her whole countenance when she learned that Jess had been at the house.

  That was when Grandpa thundered that he’d sent the bastard packing, and Maddie Rose was instantly weary again, and sadder than she’d been in a long time. Just recently, she’d even stopped crying herself to sleep at night.

  “Where were you?” Nash’s question startled Zane. “That day when Dad came, I mean?”

  Damn, the kid was like a hungry dog with a soup bone.

  “We were hiding in the basement,” Zane said, well aware of how that must sound and not really caring. “Waiting for Dad to go away.”

  Nash’s eyes rounded. “You didn’t want to see him?”

  “We were scared,” Zane said. The truth was the truth and, hell, he and Landry had been little boys at the time. Still, they’d known even then that they were better off with their mother.

  “Of Dad?” Nash was still keeping his cool, but his forehead was wrinkled up and his eyebrows almost met in the middle. “He wouldn’t have hit you or anything.”

  Zane shook his head. “No,” he said. “And that’s a point in his favor, I guess. He never laid a hand on us or on Mom, as far as I can recall, though they had some pretty spectacular fights back in the day.”

  “Then why were you scared?” Nash wasn’t letting this one go and, in a way, Zane respected him for it, even if he was borderline pissed off by then. His anger wasn’t directed at the boy—that was the thing that helped him keep a lid on his temper. But he would have liked to throttle dear old Dad with his bare hands, and that was bad enough.

  “We figured he might steal us from Mom if he got the chance,” Zane said, very quietly. Of course he wouldn’t have—having two small boys in tow would have cramped Jess Sutton’s style. He’d have had to feed them, and that took money, and a man couldn’t get money without effort.

  Ergo, he’d never had any.

  “Didn’t you even love him a little bit?” The question was plaintive, and the bewilderment in Nash’s tone made the backs of Zane’s eyes scald for a second or two.

  “Yes,” he answered, his voice dry and rough. “We loved him.” Storefronts and gas stations and a post office with a flag flying from a tall pole out front rolled past the window before he continued. “He was our dad, after all. But we loved Mom, too. And we knew she’d never go off and leave us, no matter how tough things got.”

  Things had gotten tougher after Jess’s visit, all right, and fast.

  Grandpa might have stood up to Jess that day, and hustled him out of town, pronto, but he hadn’t approved of his daughter’s choice of a husband in the first place, and he just couldn’t let that go. He took to reminding Maddie Rose how she’d wrecked her life, marrying a no-account loser like Sutton, and now she had two kids to show for it and precious little else, and if she thought he and the wife were going to support her and her boys, she had another think coming.

  Maddie Rose’s stepmother, a kindly woman named Sharon, had tried to smooth things over, but Grandpa got mad all over again every time he even thought of Jess Sutton, and he didn’t try to hide it.

  Less than two weeks later, Maddie Rose had quit her job at the fast-food joint out on Highway 10, and used her last paycheck to fill the car with gas and buy some cold cuts and fruit for the trip. Then the three of them left Tucson behind, this time, for good.

  “Wow,” Nash said, breathing the word. “That’s bleak.”

  They’d passed the town limits by then, and hit the open road that wound toward Parable, rich grasslands sprawling on either side, the sky so big and so blue that if Zane looked at it too long, he figured it might just break his heart.

  “You wanted to know,” he replied. “So I told you.”

  Of course, there was a whole lot Zane hadn’t told Nash, too. There was always the possibility that Jess had matured in the years since he’d tracked down his runaway family again. By then, Maddie Rose had found herself a good man, Hal Banks, a farmer she’d met in the café where she worked, down in Colorado, and she was starting to make noises about settling down. Zane and Landry had liked Hal, and they’d liked his small but prosperous farm, too. Then, around Christmas, Jess came back like a bad penny, driving a secondhand car and bearing gifts.

  Maddie Rose didn’t welcome him, but she let him sleep on the couch in the front room of their rented trailer for a few nights, and Hal, convinced she was still in love with her ex-husband, had quietly pulled out of the relationship.

  Jess stuck around just long enough to mess everything up for all of them, as it happened, and then, to no one’s surprise, he was gone again.

  Same song, second verse.

  They’d packed up and moved again, a few days later, and Zane and Landry said silent goodbyes to regular meals, a roof over their heads and riding the bus to and from the same school instead of finding themselves in a new one every fall.

  The muscles in Zane’s forearm corded as he shifted the truck into a higher gear, picking up speed, and Nash settled back in his seat, sighed and stared out the window, asking no more questions.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PARABLE, ZANE AND Nash soon discovered, was a bit smaller than Three Trees and a whole lot quainter. Where Three Trees boasted a couple of mega discount stores, a few strip malls and at least half a dozen franchised burger joints, Parable had small shops on Main Street, along with a café or two, and there was a well-kept park in the middle of town, too. Kids and dogs played rough-and-tumble in the neatly trimmed grass, climbed monkey bars and zipped down a curving metal slide while young mothers looked
on benevolently, chatting among themselves but with an undercurrent of vigilance.

  Being the county seat, Parable had a modest courthouse, a library and one beauty shop out on the highway—they’d passed it coming into town—with an honest-to-God mom-and-pop grocery store directly across the way. For some reason, the sight of that old-fashioned business, clearly thriving, cheered Zane up considerably.

  “Not much to this place,” Nash commented, breaking the silence that had stretched between them after the conversation about Jess. It hadn’t been awkward or uneasy, that silence—they’d just run out of things to say. That was easy to do, Zane supposed, since he and his youngest brother were not all that well-acquainted.

  “I kind of like it,” Zane answered, with a slight smile. Three Trees wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis, with a population of just under ten thousand, but Parable, with half as many people, seemed sleepy by comparison. Most of the houses were freshly painted in tasteful pastel colors, with shutters at the windows and inviting porches, and the yards neatly mowed and surrounded, almost without exception, by tidy white picket fences.

  They cruised on, taking their time, riding up one street and down the next.

  “There sure are a lot of churches,” Nash observed, after some time had passed.

  “Sure are,” Zane agreed. He wasn’t a churchgoer; he and God had a you-mind-your-business-and-I’ll-mind-mine pact going.

  They continued to explore for a while, then headed for the courthouse, tree-shaded and quite august, for such a small community. There, Zane found a cubicle marked Animal Control, paid a license fee and showed the clerk a card the people at the shelter had given him, official proof that Slim was current on his shots and therefore no threat to society. He was putting the card back in his wallet as they reached the sidewalk again, Nash eager to attach the shiny new tag they’d been given to the dog’s collar.