Sweet Return

by Anna Jeffrey

  Dalton Parker had no sooner killed his truck engine in his garage and scooted out when Candace Carlisle handed him a note. Uh-oh. She never came into the garage except to get into her car.

  “A woman from Texas left a personal message on voice mail,” Candace said.

  A pulse jumped in Dalton’s stomach. These days he knew no one in Texas but his family. “Shit,” he mumbled under his breath. “Okay, thanks.”

  He stepped back to his truck bed and lifted out a heavy cardboard box filled with cans of paint and supplies he had just bought at Home Depot. He intended to clean and repaint his office and his studio. He carried the box over and thunked it onto the wooden workbench he had built on one side of the garage.

  “Who is she, Dalton?”

  He turned and looked closer at Candace’s face, saw a shimmer of tears in her blue eyes and made a mental groan. “I don’t know. She must be who she says she is. A friend of my mother’s.”

  Candace turned sharply and left the garage, her high-heeled shoes clacking out anger in quick little steps. As Dalton watched her go, he sighed. He still couldn’t sort out exactly how she came to be living in his house, but he knew himself well enough to know that in a weak moment he must have invited her. He loved sex. He didn’t always love women, but they controlled the thing that he loved. Ergo, Candace Carlisle had moved in.

  Inside the house, he went to his office, made dim by a huge bush outside the window, and played back his voice mail messages—his agent in New York, his editor, his insurance agent. Finally he reached one from a voice he had never heard before:

  “Mr. Parker, this is Joanna Walsh in Hatlow, Texas. I’m a friend of your mother’s. You might not remember me, but we knew each other in school. Sort of. You dated my sister. I’m calling to let you know your brother was in a bad wreck early this morning and he’s in the ICU in Lubbock Memorial Hospital. His leg was crushed and the doctors aren’t willing to say yet how it’s gonna turn out. Your mom’s doing the best she can, but she could really use some help. She was real sick this past spring and isn’t completely well, and she can’t afford to hire a hand to replace Lane. She and Lane don’t have any health insurance, either. I’m hoping you can come home to the ranch for a while. If you want to call me, I have two phone numbers—806-555…”

  Had she said, Come home to the ranch? Dalton could almost laugh. The Parker ranch hadn’t been his home since his mother married Earl Cherry more than thirty years ago. It might have been where he had spent his youth, but it hadn’t been his home.

  Standing behind his desk, he listened for the second time to the message. The name Walsh had a familiar ring, but he couldn’t associate a person or an event with it. And he didn’t remember any of the girls he dated in high school. As for the message itself, it was only an extension of problems and depressing times from long ago. Those he did remember, though he didn’t want to.

  He plopped into his ergonomic desk chair, his thoughts settling on his little brother. He recalled times before when he had heard of Lane’s different accidents and injuries. He had heard of him having car wrecks before. Dalton only hoped the little bastard hadn’t been driving drunk. A vain hope, he knew, thinking back on some of his phone conversations with his mother. Apparently the kid had craved liquor ever since he was old enough to drink and drive. In that way, he was like his old man. Come to think of it, a session with whiskey and a sharp curve in the highway between Lovington and Hatlow had sent Earl Cherry to purgatory.

  He propped an elbow on his chair arm and rubbed his eyes with his fingers, family issues pricking at him. He didn’t have time to make a trip to Texas. He looked across the room to the corner of his office. His cameras, camera bags and other equipment, as well as duffel bags and backpacks, still lay in a heap. He had been home a month, but he hadn’t been able to muster the enthusiasm or the energy to even sort them. All he had done was unpack his dirty clothes.

  He was taking a break. And he needed it, he had to admit. He had shot some priceless photographs during the three-month tour from which he had just returned: a month in Afghanistan, a month in Iraq and a month in Israel. The book he was putting together would be the best he had done yet. But the experience had drained him physically, mentally and emotionally. And the last leg of it had damn near killed him. A suicide bomber had detonated himself inside a bus stopped in front of a café in Haifa where Dalton happened to be eating lunch. His custom of sitting in the back of the room had saved him that day from what could have been a fatal result.

  As an American photojournalist documenting controversial people, places and events in the Middle East, his MO had been to go about his business as inconspicuously as possible. Being beheaded with a dull knife held even less appeal than being blown to bits in a café. Through the years, curiosity and a thirst for adventure had led him into any number of hair-raising incidents. But the one in Haifa had been enough of a close call to make him decide to wait a spell to allow himself to tame the nightmares before tackling another of the world’s hellholes.

  He needed to do something simple, he had told himself, and had chosen to paint his office. He did not need to make a trip to Texas to visit his family. By any stretch of the imagination, that would be anything but simple.

  Chapter 3

  Well after noon, Joanna put in an appearance at her downtown shop. She took customers in the beauty salon only one day a week nowadays, and those were her friends and patrons of long standing. She and her mom shared a chair. Joanna did still attend schools to stay up with the latest styling trends and products. Thankfully, she had no difficulty keeping hairdressers to man the other three chairs in the salon.

  After greeting everyone, deflecting conversation about Lane Cherry’s accident and parrying an attempt by Judy Harrison to arrange an introduction to a newly divorced cousin in Denver City, Joanna finally made it to her office. It was nothing more than a desk tucked behind a half wall in the back of the long room that was the retail store, and it offered no privacy. To keep her mother from snooping, Joanna was cautious with what she left in plain sight or even in desk drawers and had password protected everything on her computer.

  She had no sooner sat down than a ping came from the chime mounted on the wall over the plateglass front door, the signal that a customer had entered the store. She stood up, looked over the half wall and saw Bert Marshall, Hatlow’s elementary school custodian. “Hi, Bert. Be right with you.”

  “Hi, Joanna,” he said from across the room. “Need a couple o’ gallons of that high-powered disinfectant floor wash.”

  Joanna’s Salon & Supplies was Hatlow’s only janitorial supply. For that matter, it was the only one in half a dozen surrounding counties except for Lubbock. After Joanna bought the beauty salon and the building that housed it ten years ago, she had more space than she needed for the salon. She hired a carpenter to build a wall between the salon and what was now the store area and added beauty products and fragrances.

  After the construction work was completed, while cleaning up the disorder, she stumbled across another need—this one for easily available janitorial supplies. On a hunch, she converted one entire wall of the beauty supply store to a display of commercial cleaning products and rental cleaning equipment.

  Now the janitorial products produced as much income as the beauty supplies. Customers drove from other small towns to the south to keep from driving to Lubbock and dealing with the traffic madness. Most small-town West Texans, used to the wide-open spaces, equated a trip to Lubbock with a trip to hell. If requested to do so, Joanna even provided shipping.

  She walked out into the store to talk to Bert, a wiry-haired older gentleman and a Hatlow native. “What needs disinfecting at the elementary school?”

  “Oh, nothing different,” Bert answered. “Just trying to keep the place clean and wipe out a few germs.” He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a purchase order from the Wacker County School District. “Those kids sure do mess things up.” He bent over the counter and filled i
n the blanks on the purchase order forms. “Makes you wonder what they’re like at home.”

  “I know what you mean,” Joanna said absently, though she really didn’t. She had no children. And at her age, unmarried and too busy to even think about kowtowing to some man, she wasn’t likely to have any.

  “I heard about Lane Cherry’s wreck.” Bert shook his gray head.

  “Yeah, I suppose everybody has by now.”

  “That boy’s gonna kill hisself one o’ these days.”

  Joanna had heard that comment about Lane for years, but she was unconvinced. He seemed to have nine lives. “I know.”

  “How’s Clova holding up under the strain?”

  “Oh, you know Clova. She’s the Energizer Bunny. She just keeps going and going.”

  “Do ya reckon Dalton will come back and help her out?”

  All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be interested in what Dalton Parker might do next. “Who knows? Maybe.”

  “I heard he’s over in I-raq taking pictures.”

  Joanna’s expectations plummeted. If he wasn’t even in the country, he wouldn’t be coming back to Texas to help out his mother anytime soon. Now what? she wondered. “Really? I hadn’t heard that.”

  The custodian gathered four plastic gallon jugs and brought them back to the cash register. “Gonna be a hot one today. We’ll be lucky if we don’t get one o’ them barn flatteners tonight.”

  Joanna glanced through the shop’s plate-glass windows and saw an overcast sky. The temperature had already climbed to ninetysomething before she left home. Bert was right. Conditions were coming together for a violent storm in the evening. She needed to get out to Clova’s early and pen up the hens.

  “How’s your egg business doin’?”

  “It’s okay, Bert. It’s doing okay. In fact, I’m out in front of my business plan. I’m hoping to show a profit this year.” An exaggeration, but not a total fib. She believed putting a positive spin on things did no harm.

  “How’re those hens gettin’ along with those donkeys?”

  Joanna had adopted two rescue donkeys from the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico, having read that donkeys, while harmless to chickens, would frighten away other predators. “Great,” Joanna answered. “They’re buds.”

  Bert gave an old man’s heh-heh-heh. “I laugh ever’ time I think about donkeys and chickens grazin’ with the cows on that ranch. Lord, Earl Cherry’s prob’ly spinnin’ in his grave.”

  Joanna huffed. “From what I’ve heard about him, he’s lucky if that’s the worst that’s happening to him.”

  “Yep. Ol’ Earl was cut from a different cloth, that’s fer sure. I s’pose when he was livin’, he was awful unkind to his family.”

  As he lugged his purchases toward the front door, she stepped ahead of him, opened the door and held it for him.

  “You stay out of the weather, now, you hear?” he said.

  “I will,” she assured him.

  As she completed the paperwork on the sale of supplies to the school, her mother came in from the salon. Mom might work six days a week, but she kept banker’s hours. “Taking a break?” Joanna asked her.

  “I wish you’d make up your mind just what business you’re gonna be in, Joanna. Everybody in the shop was gigglin’ ’bout you sellin’ disinfectant from the same counter you sell perfume and permanent waves.”

  Just as Hatlowites made good-natured fun of Joanna’s egg business, they made fun of her other businesses, too. She tried to ignore the jeers. Multidimensional, she called herself. She wanted to live in Hatlow, but with the town having almost no job market, she’d had to figure out how to make a living on her own. If she hadn’t been able to mold it all together and make it work, she would have had to stay in Lubbock, where she had gone to college for a year and beauty school for another year and worked as a hairdresser and nail tech for a short time. Or she might have had to move to Amarillo, or, God forbid, Fort Worth. She would hate any of those options. “Mom, do you not have any customers this morning?”

  “I’m waitin’ on Ida Crocker. She’s comin’ in for a perm.”

  “Please tell me you asked her to leave Charlie at home.”

  Charlie was a miniature Yorkie weighing less than four pounds, but he barked louder than a St. Bernard and snarled and snapped at other patrons who came into the beauty shop. He usually left a deposit in some corner or under a station so that someone had to crawl under and clean up his souvenir after Ida left.

  “I always ask her, but she does what she wants. I hate to say too much. That dog’s all she’s got, and I need the business.”

  “Hm.” Joanna returned to her office, unlocked a file cabinet drawer and lifted out a small stack of invoices.

  Her mother followed and braced a shoulder against the doorjamb, blocking the doorway. “I heard Lane Cherry’s in a bad way. What’s Clova gonna do now?”

  Good question, Joanna thought, dropping into her desk chair and sorting the invoices on her desktop. “Whatever she has to, Mom. You know Clova.”

  “Suzy Martinez from the bank said she’s in real bad shape. Financially, I mean. She could lose that ranch.”

  Ah, gossip. The beauty salon was a conduit of unparalleled effectiveness in spreading it. With no fewer than three full-time hairdressers and their patrons present most of the time, every triumph and tragedy that occurred in Hatlow was picked apart and analyzed daily. Only occasionally in a malicious way, Joanna was always quick to point out.

  She didn’t look up from her sorting task. “Suzy shouldn’t be coming to the beauty shop and talking about the bank’s customers. That’s private information. I just wonder what she tells about my business.”

  “She don’t mean no harm. She’s just concerned.”

  “Mom, she has a vicious mouth and it’s scary that she has access to everyone in town’s financial information. Don’t you need to get ready for Ida?”

  “Yeah.” Mom looked across the store and out the wide display window. “And here she comes now. Carrying Charlie.”

  “Just try to make sure she hangs on to him,” Joanna said in her cranky voice. Suzy, a Farmers Bank employee, talking about Clova’s money, or lack of it, in the beauty shop had rankled her and compounded her bad mood. “Even if Charlie was a sweet dog instead of a pest, you know we can’t have even a little dog running around the shop. It’s unsanitary. He’s supposed to be a lap dog, so make him stay on her lap.”

  “My Lord, Joanna, I don’t know where you got such a bee in your bonnet about keeping everything so damn clean. You sure didn’t inherit that from me.”

  No kidding, Joanna thought, glancing up at her mother with an arch look.

  Alvadean pushed away from the doorjamb and went out into the beauty supply store. Joanna heard the front door chime, then heard her mother greeting Ida.

  Joanna booted up her computer, opened the file she had named EGGS and began to study the records. She did that often. As she perused the record of the baby chicks purchased compared to the hens lost or the ones that had stopped laying, her thoughts traveled back to how she came to own two hundred hens.

  She had Clova to thank. Two and a half years ago, at the older friend’s urging, Joanna started with fifty pullets. Little by little, despite a constant battle with predators and the missteps of learning how to cull the roosters and retain and manage the hens, the flock of fifty had grown to two hundred.

  Why Clova had wanted to see her in the egg business, Joanna didn’t know, but she had a suspicion. She thought it might have something to do with the fact that Clova was a lonely person whose two grown kids ignored her. Joanna believed she longed for company. She felt as if Clova looked at her sort of as the daughter she never had and figured the chickens living at her place would ensure that Joanna would be out to the Parker ranch often.

  Now Joanna had a variety of hens, a few exotics along with a majority of the more common breeds of layers. She ended up with blue eggs, green eggs, even some she called “khaki” and many
brown eggs. The exotic hens didn’t lay as well as the more traditional layers, but it was fun to take “Easter eggs” to market. Her customers in Lubbock and Amarillo liked them, too. She collected three dollars per dozen at wholesale or five dollars at retail. Customers didn’t seem to balk at the prices. That fact blew Joanna away. A few years back, she wouldn’t have believed someone would pay more than forty cents an egg for a dozen free-range eggs. But there it was. Another fad. The American way.

  In spite of those numbers, she wasn’t making a fortune. The business barely paid its way, and during some months, she had to dip into the funds from the beauty salon or the retail store to pay for something related to the egg business. She fretted day and night over how to make more profit from the eggs. If the business made more money, she could hire someone to work at it full-time and not be so tied down herself. But alas, she knew only too well that a small entrepreneur, if she couldn’t afford to hire help, had to be willing to do any and every task required.

  Sometimes she felt guilty about using Clova’s land rent free, but every time she looked at the egg business’s financial records, that guilt slunk into the background. The plain truth was that if she were required to pay rent to Clova or anyone else, the egg business would be in the hole monthly. To free herself of guilt and a constant feeling of obligation, she needed her own little piece of real estate. In West Texas, land was cheap, but now the chance of her finding enough extra money to buy some of it was almost nonexistent.

  At one point, Joanna had held the Pollyanna-ish notion that the egg venture might grow into a business she could sell, then invest the proceeds in a retirement fund. She needed a retirement fund, having started to consider that she might be alone and self-supporting until the day she died.