by Caro Carson
He talked her through that punch. “The human body can’t last indefinitely, but they may have lived a very long time. Death is a part of—”
He had to stop there. His usual logic didn’t quite fit. Or maybe it did. “Death is part of many jobs. Ranching can be dangerous, but they must have loved it, to have worked on ranches until their last days.”
His attempt at comfort backfired. Diana began crying tears, real tears, and they were definitely not a reaction to a perfect, beautiful moment. Quinn felt helpless. She was genuinely distressed at the thought of the men who’d been forgotten.
He’d never been with a woman so tenderhearted. No wine, no roses, no tasteful gold bracelet would soothe this kind of hurt. Quinn had none of those available, anyway. He had only himself. So, for what it was worth, he offered that to Diana. He touched her tentatively with one hand, and held his other arm open. “Would you like to cry on my shoulder, maybe?”
She turned into him. Without her high heels, she felt smaller, more vulnerable. He held her more tightly.
“I’m the last one of my family,” she said, after a minute. She used the heel of one hand to wipe her cheeks, but he noticed she kept her other arm firmly around his waist. “The very last one.”
Now her tears made sense. Quinn could handle discussions about mortality. He’d had dozens of patients ask him if they were going to die, and when. “You’re afraid you’ll be forgotten when you die. That is a painful thought.”
Quinn felt a certain sense of relief at Diana’s explanation. He took over the tear-wiping duties, using his thumb to smooth the wetness across her perfect cheek. The dry summer heat would evaporate the rest in no time. “I don’t think you’ll be the last of your family. Don’t you see yourself being married someday, having children of your own?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. It could happen.”
But, Quinn realized, she didn’t really believe it would, although he couldn’t imagine why she didn’t. A woman like Diana Connor seemed cut out for motherhood. She was friendly, and beautiful to boot. Some man would get to know her well, become her husband, share her life.
Right now, he was the man who knew her. He was the one who knew what lay under her most superficial layers of sequins and smiles. But someday, it would be some other man, and that man would know her far better. He’d know what color her hair was in the frost as well as the sun. He’d know what she was like when she was round with pregnancy. He’d know what she was like when she was old.
Quinn felt a stab of envy for that unknown man.
He cleared his throat, heading into unfamiliar territory. “A matchmaker like you will find her own match. You will be married someday. You won’t be forgotten when you pass away.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about. When that time comes, I won’t care, will I? But I can’t stand the thought that if I died tomorrow, no one would be left to know who my mother was. No one will visit her grave. She’ll be just like these men. A name and a date. Nothing more.”
Quinn was ready for fresh tears, but Diana stepped away from him and turned her face up to the branches of the shade tree. She flapped her hands in front of her cheeks and blinked her eyes a few times.
“I can’t go back to the house so upset,” she said. “It will just upset everyone else.”
Quinn pictured his sisters-in-law. His mother. Jamie and Braden. “I think everyone could handle it, honestly.”
“There’s a quote my mother liked that I think is very true. ‘There’s enough misery in the world without you adding yours to it.’ She wouldn’t want me crying over her, not while I’m on a very nice date with a very nice man, and I don’t want to be the guest that brings misery to your family picnic. Just give me a minute to get myself together.”
She fluttered her hands with more determination. Quinn wished he could do more. He hated standing by helplessly, but no matter what poets or preachers said, pain couldn’t be shared. When he’d been a kid and lost his grandmother, even his own mother’s hugs could only do so much. He’d worked off a lot of his grief in the stables, shoveling out old hay, forking in new, with Patch as his constant companion.
Of course. Quinn whistled, hoping any of the dogs would come running. They all did. Within seconds, Diana couldn’t keep fanning her face, because the dogs were licking her salty, wet hands. Her smile returned as she buried her hands in his dogs’ ruffs, as she cooed “good boy” and found another stick to throw.
Quinn watched it all with a powerful, unfamiliar feeling in his chest. As a cardiologist, he knew emotions couldn’t affect the size of the heart, but if he were less educated, if he’d lived in a long-ago, superstitious century, he might say his heart swelled as he watched Diana Connor playing with Patch the Second.
Chapter Nine
They arrived back at the house after the food had already been blessed and the potato salad passed. They washed up and took their places at the picnic table on the flagstone back porch.
Diana bore no resemblance to the woman who’d mourned the forgotten ranch hands. Quinn supposed a backyard cookout was the same as a party, and Diana was in her element, sparkling and happy. Her joy in the meal was infectious, and Quinn watched his whole family benefit from Diana being at their table.
She knew Lana well enough to encourage her to recount her tales of the bridal worries she’d experienced the day before her wedding. Quinn hadn’t had any idea that Lana, the coolly competent director of research and development at West Central Texas Hospital, had worried about such frivolous things as the width of ribbons. Lana couldn’t seem to believe how stressed out she’d been over it herself. Her obsession seemed normal and amusing, though, once Diana shared stories of other brides she’d known.
Diana was a dream guest to have at a gathering, the one who made everyone feel at ease, even when the guests were family who’d known each other their entire lives. His mother had caught his eye several times and directed all sorts of approving pantomimes at him.
He ate brisket, he laughed with everyone else and he watched Diana. As he had at the gala, Quinn wondered what was behind Diana’s magic. Trained to pay attention to details, he started to notice a pattern.
Diana brought out the best in everyone by finding out what they needed in order to relax and be themselves. Last night, he’d needed to stop his self-imposed no-play-and-all-work policy, now that the hospital was going to survive the damage done by its former CEO. Becky Cargill had needed to be able to literally let go of her loose dress and dance. Quinn never would have guessed that Lana needed to be able to laugh at her temporary wedding madness. If anyone stayed in Diana’s vicinity long enough, she’d find a way to make him or her feel better about themselves.
So that’s how she does it. Her “magic” could be analyzed and elucidated, which made him respect her abilities all the more. Even when meeting strangers, she had an uncanny instinct about what people needed. When baby Sammy was passed to Diana for some time in her lap, his mother Kendry had no more than glanced at the red sunglasses perched on Diana’s head before Diana had taken them off and set them out of the baby’s sight. Kendry sat back to talk to her husband, and only then did Quinn realize that she’d been poised on the edge of her seat, ready to intervene if Sammy should make a grab for those red glasses.
Diana was a keen observer, and she used that skill to please others. But when it came to Diana, who observed her? Who found out what she needed? She made it impossible by appearing to have no cares of her own.
The meal was over and everyone was lingering over brownies when Quinn’s mother asked Diana what she’d seen on her walk. Diana had given a charming answer, one that segued naturally into encouraging his mother to talk about her pride and joy, her flower beds.
“We stopped at the old cemetery,” Quinn said, as Diana was setting down her iced tea.
Quinn doubted anyone but he noticed
the way Diana’s tea glass slipped a mere quarter of an inch, plunking down on the wooden plank of the table just hard enough to make the ice rattle. He didn’t want to upset her, but deep down, he knew—he was the only one who knew—that she was torn up at the thought of her own mother being as forgotten as the buried ranch hands. Maybe he could fix it for her. His mother knew everything there was to know about this land.
“Did those men work the River Mack, Mom?”
“No, that cemetery is part of the hundred and forty we bought from Whitey McCormick. May I give Sam his bottle, Kendry?”
Diana kept her face turned away from Quinn.
Aw, hell. His mother didn’t know anything about the men in those graves. Quinn cursed himself for dimming Diana’s bright smile. He didn’t have her instincts, obviously. He’d thought surely his mother would know all about the cemetery.
Once Quinn’s mother had her grandson happily settled in her arms, however, she picked up the subject again. “It was 1990, right after Christmas. Whitey came over here out of the blue and offered to sell it to us. He said he wanted a real family to take over his land, not a conglomerate.”
“The Watersons are on the east side,” Braden said. “They’re a real family.”
Marion MacDowell looked around the table at Quinn and his brothers. “You children were so cute, I think you sealed the deal for us before we knew the land was even for sale.”
Jamie laughed at that. “I’ll bet Mrs. Waterson thought Luke and Jimmy were cuter.”
“Well, there were three of you and only two of them, so we had the advantage. Do you remember Whitey?”
Jamie was watching his son drink. “I was only three years old, Mom. Make sure Sam doesn’t get too much air with that bottle.”
“I know how to give a baby a bottle, young man.”
Diana sighed a little. Quinn wanted to believe it was a sound of contentment, but he couldn’t lie to himself. Diana’s sigh had been wistful. Full of longing. Lonely.
* * *
Diana was relieved the conversation was turning away from the cemetery. She’d been having such a good time at this family party, she didn’t want to think about the poor dead cowboys. She wanted to keep living the little fantasy in her head, the one she’d kept up the whole meal, the one where Marion MacDowell was her mother.
She wouldn’t take for granted her mother’s potato salad. Even if she’d eaten it every day of her twenty-seven years, Diana would still tell her mother how wonderful it was. She would already know the recipe by heart, of course. It was apparent from the conversation that Marion had a health problem that brought unpredictable bad days, so Diana would have insisted her mother take it easy. She would have come early today and made the potato salad for her. She and her mother would have been very close.
“I remember Whitey McCormack,” Quinn said.
Diana hoped her smile didn’t slip. Did Quinn have to intrude on her little fantasy? Did he have to remind her about cemeteries, about her real mother’s location?
“I remember him, too,” Braden said. “Whitey was old as the hills, with a long white beard.”
This seemed only to encourage Quinn. “Yes, and he always carried a staff that was taller than he was, and you’ll like this part, Diana. He had a great dog.”
Braden took another brownie from the serving platter. “I remember that dog. Little scrappy thing. Runt of the litter. I swear, the way Whitey bragged about the runt, I assumed it was a positive word until I was in high school. Being a runt had to be a great thing. Who wouldn’t want to be a runt? I was sad when Dad explained that I wasn’t the runt.”
“Sure you were,” Jamie said, with a touch of irritation to his voice.
Diana thought Braden was going on a bit too long about runts, too. Quinn was getting those crinkles at the corners of his eyes again, the good ones that meant he might break into a smile at any moment.
Braden kept singing the praises of runts. “When I called someone ‘runt,’ it was a compliment of the highest order.”
“You can shut up anytime now.” Jamie grabbed a beer from the cooler the brothers had set conveniently in reach and opened the bottle by hitting the cap just so on the edge of the picnic table.
“Anything you say, runt.”
Then Quinn and Braden and their mother—and even Jamie—all laughed, and Diana knew it was a family joke. It was so easy to fall right back into her fantasy of being in this family.
Sam fussed, and Jamie stood up to take him from Marion. Braden stood, too, and Diana noticed the “runt” was actually a tiny bit taller than his oldest brother. Braden was closest to Marion, so Sammy was passed from Marion to Braden to Jamie to Kendry, who excused herself, saying it was nap time and she’d have Sammy asleep in a jiffy.
In the brief silence that followed the baby’s crying and the brothers’ ribbing about runts, Marion turned toward Diana. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more about the cemetery.”
“Please, don’t worry about it for a second.”
“It made her sad,” Quinn said, “because no one remembers the men buried there.”
Diana was appalled. She didn’t want Marion to think anything about her picnic had been anything less than a success. Her smile wobbled. She couldn’t help it. How could Quinn do this to her?
“Cemeteries aren’t exactly happy places,” Marion said.
Diana couldn’t keep smiling when Marion said the subject wasn’t happy, so she took a sip of tea.
“You have a sensitive heart, I can tell, for you to worry about men long gone,” Marion said.
Diana was at a loss. She didn’t know how to handle this topic at a party, so she kept drinking tea like a fool, looking over the rim of her glass at the others. Braden, Jamie and Lana all looked interested, but not upset. They didn’t seem to think the picnic was ruined. Diana didn’t trust herself to look at Quinn. She wanted to smack him for bringing up the subject.
Marion was watching her as she set her tea down. “I sure hate for you to leave here sad about it. Maybe you can think of it this way. Whitey knew every one of those men buried on his land. They had to have touched him in some way, and changed him, and made him the man he was. It might have been something as silly as telling him a joke that made him laugh, but every one of those men touched Whitey.
“My boys knew Whitey, and he made an impression on them. Well, Jamie was too young, but Braden and Quinn knew Whitey, and then they in turn made an impression on Jamie, and now he has a boy of his own. So you see, those cowboys’ lives might not be remembered in detail, but they touched people, and those people touched other people, generation after generation. People don’t walk this earth for no reason.”
As she kept her hand on her cold tea glass, Diana felt Quinn squeeze her other hand under the table. She kept her attention on his mother’s kind face. “Oh, that’s something my mother would have said. That every experience touches us and makes us who we are in some small way.”
“Well, there you have it. Jamie, refill her tea.” Marion smiled at Diana, looking every inch the calm, wise and beautiful image of motherhood. “So tell me, dear, how has Quinn touched you?”
Quinn and Braden and Jamie, all three of them, exchanged a look. The silence lasted a heartbeat, and then the men simultaneously began coughing and choking and snickering.
“Yes,” Braden gasped, “tell us how Quinn has touched you.”
The Madonna-like Marion rolled her eyes and threw up a hand in disgust.
“Oh, grow up, gentlemen. Try to move past age twelve.” But her expression wasn’t as stern as her words, and Diana found herself on the verge of laughing, too, if only to laugh at the way the MacDowell men were laughing. They were doctors, for goodness’ sake. She expected more from them—which made it even funnier that they were cracking up in such a juvenile way.
Marion s
macked Quinn’s arm—he deserved that—to make him sit back, so she could reach across him and place her hand over Diana’s arm, where it rested on the table as her fingertips grew numb on the frosty glass. “Ignore them. I’m hoping there’s at least one positive thing you’ve gotten from knowing my Quinn.”
“I’ve only known him for a day,” Diana began apologetically.
This seemed to silence everyone’s sniggering. She felt Marion’s hand jerk a little bit.
Diana bit her lip and looked around the table.
Kendry came back. “Did I miss anything?”
Marion let go of Diana’s arm. “Quinn and Diana have only been together one day. I never would have guessed.” She sounded astonished. Perhaps girlfriends of only a day weren’t supposed to come to family picnics. Diana hoped desperately that Marion couldn’t tell that she’d slept with her son already.
It was definitely time to put this party back on track. She was willing to be the clown to do it. Everyone loved dopey, bubbly Diana.
“We met last night, at the hospital gala.” Diana smiled too brightly. Even she could feel it. “If you count that as our first date, then this is really the second. Two days. We’ve known each other twice as long as I said. I’m so bad at math. But already, he’s ruined me for champagne. I liked the cheap stuff just fine, until he gave me real champagne. Now I’ll never look at sparkling wine the same way again. Isn’t that terrible?”
She let go of her iced tea and twisted quickly to place the icy wetness on her fingertips on the back of Quinn’s neck, like she imagined an annoying little sister should. He yelped and jumped in surprise, and everyone laughed.
Braden stood and tapped his beer bottle with a spoon, directing everyone’s attention to himself—and preventing Quinn from retaliating. “Speaking of champagne, Lana and I brought the good stuff. We have an announcement to make. We’re going to have a baby. We’re due the first week of November.”
The news was wonderful. Everyone stood to hug each other, and while the champagne cork was being popped, Lana whispered in Diana’s ear, “Since we just got married two weeks ago, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do the math. It’s a little embarrassing. We jumped the gun.”
