Sweet Return

by Anna Jeffrey

  “Where’s my mom?” he asked.

  “Uh, one of the neighbors called about a break in the fence. She’s gone to feed and to check on it.”

  “Which one?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which neighbor?”

  “Oh. Uh, Hulsey. August Hulsey. Do you know him?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Oh. Of course you used to know him.” She lifted her open palms and let them fall. “I mean, he’s been around here forever. He’s old now.”

  It was eleven o’clock on a Friday morning in September in the Texas Panhandle. The sun was already a ball of fire in a blue sky dotted with mushrooming white thunderheads, and the temperature was over ninety. “It’s hot,” she said. “There’s some fresh sun tea. Would you like some?”

  “Yeah.”

  She stepped back up onto the porch and reached for the screen door handle. As she pulled, the old wooden door stuck. She jerked and it came loose with a pop. The edge whacked her right between the eyes, knocking her head backward and causing a shot of pain that almost blinded her.

  He was suddenly standing behind her, his thick arm to the right of her face, holding the door open. His scent, woodsy and masculine, surrounded her. “You hurt?”

  “Uh, no. I’m fine. Sorry. It needs work done on it. The porch has shifted and…well, anyway.” She shrugged and walked on into the house. The spot just above the bridge of her nose throbbed with every quick pulse beat, but she resisted rubbing it.

  The Parker ranch house had been built before homes had entries, so the front door opened into the living room. He stopped just inside and looked around, no doubt reacquainting himself.

  “Uh, that tea’s in the kitchen.” She wound her way through the dining room into the kitchen. He followed.

  She grabbed a bowl from the cupboard, pulled a plastic ice tray from the refrigerator and began to twist it and break out ice cubes into the bowl. “Uh, your mom doesn’t use the ice maker. The well water isn’t fit to drink, as you may remember. It corrodes plumbing so bad, Clova has to battle it all the time. The cistern got a crack in it last year and quit holding water. She buys drinking water in town now.”

  He continued to look at her intently as she prattled like a twit. Under his scrutiny, just preparing a glass of iced tea seemed like a Herculean task, but she finally succeeded and handed it to him. He took it and sipped, then looked down into the brown liquid for a few seconds. He looked back at her. “Got any sugar?”

  “Sugar? Oh, yes. Certainly.” She could have sworn she had put sugar in that tea. She strode across the kitchen as if it were her own, lifted a china sugar bowl from the cupboard and a spoon from a drawer and handed both to him.

  He sauntered into the dining room carrying his tea and the sugar bowl. He took a seat at the round oak dining table, dumped three heaping teaspoons of sugar into the tea and stirred. When he caught her staring, he said, as if she had asked, “I got used to the way they drink tea overseas.”

  She nodded and sank to a chair adjacent to his. Now, with him no more than three feet away, she let herself take in his square jaw, the dark shadow of his beard, the defined cleft of his upper lip that perfectly fit against a full, square lower lip. She stopped herself; she never stared at men’s mouths. “I see. Where, um, would ‘overseas’ be?”

  “The Middle East.” He nodded toward the glass she had poured for herself. She wasn’t even conscious she had brought it from the kitchen. “Aren’t you drinking?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” She picked up her glass and sipped. “I take mine straight,” she added with a silly giggle. Her forehead throbbed like hell and she could feel the sting of broken skin. No doubt a bruise would greet her in the mirror tomorrow.

  He picked up his glass and she watched as he drank deeply, his throat muscles working rhythmically. The temperature in the old house was probably eighty, but she felt an urge to shiver.

  The glass had made a ring of condensation on the table. The round table, an antique, had been refinished recently and Clova was careful about marring it. Joanna grabbed a paper napkin from a holder in the middle of the table and swiped away the moisture.

  He gave the tabletop, then her, a look. “Do you live here or something?”

  “Uh, no. I’m just…” She stopped. How could she come up with a short explanation for why she was in someone else’s house making herself at home. Whatever explanation she concocted, she suspected this guy wouldn’t believe her. “I live in town. It’s like I said in the phone message I left you. I’m a friend helping out.”

  His forearms, tanned, with ropey veins standing out against defined muscle, came to rest on the tabletop. “Then you must know when my mother started raising chickens.”

  Chapter 7

  “Oh.” Joanna sat up straighter and blinked. “Well, uh, those are mine. I’m in the egg business. You know, free-range eggs?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  The words came at her sharp as knives. “No. I’m not. It’s—it’s part of the organic food craze that’s going around these days. What it means is the hens aren’t kept penned up. They live freely and feed on bugs and grass and stuff, like they used to in the old days. I still have to feed them some, but—”

  “I know about free-range eggs. You’d have to sell a helluva a lot of eggs to make that worthwhile. So you’re what, leasing land from Mom for that?”

  She almost told him that she used the land for free, but the tone of his question and a gut instinct stilled her tongue. Clova’s statement of a few days ago flew into her consciousness. If somethin’ happened to me, I know them boys wouldn’t let you keep these chickens or these donkeys here. They’d prob’ly run you clear off.

  Dammit, she didn’t want to have this conversation with him without his mother’s presence. And she certainly didn’t want to end up in a confrontation with a friend’s son whom she didn’t even know. Wounded by his antagonistic tone, she stammered, “Uh, well, um, not really. We’ve kind of got a deal we both like. It’s, um, hard to explain.”

  “I’m beginning to see that. And those jackasses are part of this egg business?”

  “Actually, they’re supposed to keep predators away.” His mouth didn’t smirk, but she could see the disdain in his eyes. As quick as lightning, that look turned her anxiety into irritation, if not downright anger. She had done nothing wrong. Why should she feel so intimidated by him? After all, he was the one who had ignored his family. “They do keep the predators away,” she added more firmly.

  “That’s hard to believe. Your message said my mother’s sick. What’s wrong with her?”

  “I can’t imagine that you don’t know, but she had walking pneumonia back in the spring. It really got a grip on her and she hasn’t been able to stop working long enough to get well. She’s better, but still not a hundred percent. She waited too long to go to the doctor.”

  He said not one word, just looked at her, picked up his glass and finished off his tea.

  She abandoned hope of congenial conversation. “Did you drive here, uh, Dalton? I can call you Dalton, right? Or would you prefer Mr. Parker?”

  “You can call me Dalton.”

  Ass! She held her tongue, but her eyes bugged.

  He turned his attention to the dining room’s picture window and the view of the fenced pasture where the hens lived. In the sun-brightened area, they were strutting and clucking and scratching the ground for bugs.

  Gray, life-size plastic owls perched on posts at strategic locations. Her two donkeys grazed beside the short flagpole from which thin, silky Asian flags fluttered and flicked pointed ends in the breeze, all of it her effort to protect the hens from flying predators. She didn’t have to be told that a source even more fatal than a chicken hawk suddenly jeopardized her business. She had no idea whether Clova would resist if her oldest son insisted the hens be removed.

  She cleared her throat. “So, um, did you drive all the way from California?”

  “Flew to Lubbock.
That piece of shit in the driveway’s a rental.” He got to his feet. “There’s usually a work truck around here. Where is it?”

  “Your mom took it. To feed the cows and check on the downed fence. Her dually’s parked in the shed, but she doesn’t usually drive it out into the pasture. There’s an ATV, but it isn’t working.”

  He mumbled a cussword.

  She made up her mind to try again. Miss Congeniality. “Look, my truck’s here. Your mom’s all the way at the back of the south pasture. I—I could—I’d be glad to drive you down there. There really isn’t a road, but my truck’s got four-wheel drive.”

  His head turned her way and he stared at her. “I know where Hulsey’s place is.” Then a smirk tipped up a corner of his mouth. “But, yeah, you can take me down there. Let’s go.” He walked to the coat tree in the corner, helped himself to a bill cap and walked out, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  Asshole! She sat at the table a few more seconds, collecting herself. She had met all kinds of people in her various enterprises, but she couldn’t recall ever meeting someone she wanted to throttle at the same time she imagined jumping his bones. On a deep breath, she got to her feet, picked up the two glasses and took them to the kitchen, then followed him outside.

  She found him standing on the porch, staring across the driveway at her hens. Without looking at her, he lifted the cap, pushed his fingers through thick, but short, graying hair, then shoved the cap down on his head. “Just exactly how many chickens have you got here?”

  She hesitated, debating whether she should fib about the number. Horse sense told her not to. “At this moment? Two hundred. Sometimes a few more, sometimes less.”

  He turned his head her way. The look that came at her was a cross between anger and incredulity. “Two hundred? Goddamn…chickens?”

  Oh, dear God. She did a mental eye roll. “Look, Mr. Parker—”

  “I said you can call me Dalton.”

  She mustered a glare of her own. “I think I prefer Mr. Parker.”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “Suit yourself. Let’s go see about that fence.” He left the porch in a long stride, trekked toward her Chevy pickup and climbed in on the passenger side as if the vehicle were his.

  Now Joanna was so put off she didn’t know if she could even drive, but she trailed after him and hoisted herself into the cab. She cranked the engine and away they went.

  They soon reached the road that led to the south pasture. It was nothing more than two parallel tire tracks that traveled over grassy humps and bumps and through sandy gullies and arroyos. She set her jaw. Her pickup was her only vehicle, and she kept it clean and shiny. Though it was a four-wheel-drive pickup, she didn’t drive it on rough terrain or through bushes. Unfortunately, it was too late to unvolunteer for this ride. Shifting into four-wheel drive, she steeled herself to ignore what the sagebrush branches and mesquite tree thorns would do to her paint job, not to mention that she could end up with mesquite thorns in all four tires.

  At five miles per hour, the five-mile trip took almost that long—an hour.

  He didn’t say much, just looked all around, sometimes sticking his head out the window as if that allowed him to see more clearly. As they passed a cluster of grazing cattle, every one of them looked up and stared at them with curiosity, which, Joanna had learned since spending so much time with the Lazy P herd, was the nature of cattle.

  “Cows don’t look too bad,” he said, more to himself than to her. “I assume they’re all pregnant. Looks like Mom’s still got the same crosses.”

  Joanna wasn’t an expert on cattle and didn’t know if they were pregnant. She didn’t comment, though she did know that most of the Lazy P cattle were a crossbreed of Hereford and Black Angus. At this time of year, with sleek black or russet bodies and snow-white faces, they looked fat and round and healthy. Maybe they were pregnant.

  After long minutes of a dearth of conversation, he finally said, “Pasture’s in piss-poor shape.”

  No arguing that point. Joanna wasn’t an expert on rangeland, either, but she didn’t have to be to see the wide patches of bare sandy dirt where grass had once grown, and talk of the lengthy drought was common all over the county. “We’ve had a drought for several years running. And Clova thinks the pasture’s been overgrazed.”

  “If it’s overgrazed, why didn’t she sell off some stock or move ’em to another pasture?”

  Inside, Joanna winced. Any answer she gave to his question could be classified only as tattling. She couldn’t remember when she had ever been so uptight. Having not eaten since early morning, her stomach began to cramp. “It wasn’t…uh, well, it wasn’t totally under her control.”

  “Why the hell not? She still owns the place, doesn’t she?”

  “Well, yes, but…” Joanna stopped herself. How Clova ran the Parker ranch really was none of her business.

  “What’s the ‘but’?”

  She drew in a breath. “Lane’s supposed to be taking care of the cows, but he’s gone a lot and he’s—”

  “Forget it. I know what he’s been doing. Or not doing. He’s too much like his old man.”

  “Mr. Parker, I’m not anxious to criticize Lane. You need to discuss this with your mother.” Aggravation spiked within her again, and she found the nerve to say, “You haven’t been around here, either, you know.”

  “Touché,” he said, drilling her with those penetrating eyes, his irritation so sentient it almost had a life of its own. “What’s your name again?” he asked.

  Damn him. She refused to believe he didn’t remember her name. She had left it on his voice mail and she had just told him again in the front yard. “Joanna.”

  He returned to staring out the window and said nothing else. She would give an arm to know what was stewing inside his head. Soon they drove up on the old blue ranch truck. A few yards away, they saw Alicia and Clova surrounded by curious cattle and struggling with a wire stretcher. They had succeeded in closing the hole in the fence.

  Clova must have recognized her son immediately because she dropped her tools. She started toward them in a walk that soon became a run. Dalton opened the door and slid to the ground just in time to wrap his arms around his mother. Clova broke into sobs of joy against his chest and they stood there in an embrace inside the shade of the pickup door.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” he said softly against her hair, patting her back. “I’m here now.”

  “You should o’ tol’ somebody you’s comin’,” Clova said on a hitch of breath. “I ain’t got nothin’ cooked or anything.”

  “Shh-shh,” he told her softly.

  The obvious affection between them didn’t mesh with the gossip Joanna had heard from her mother and sister last Sunday or with the impression he had made on her in the last hour and a half. He might be an overbearing bastard, but something about him made her know that somehow he would fix everything. And he might even save the Parker ranch. From what she could see, Clova felt that way, too. Joanna looked away and wiped a tear of her own.

  With Clova’s love for her oldest son so obviously desperate and long-suffering, Joanna found their reunion painful to watch. It touched her in an unexpected way. If Clova loved him so much, why and how had she gone so long without contact with him?

  Taking Alicia into her pickup, Joanna left mother and son at the broken fence. Once on the road back to town, fatigue that had been accumulating for a week fell on her like a boulder. The energy she had left to devote to Clova’s dysfunctional family waned. All she could think of was a long, peaceful nap.

  “You’ve done a good job this week, kiddo,” she told Alicia. “Above and beyond the call, I’d say.”

  “You have the sore head,” Alicia said, pointing to her own forehead.

  Joanna didn’t have the will to discuss it or explain it in detail. She gingerly touched the injury between her eyes and chuckled. “Would you believe I ran into a door?”

  “Oh,” the teenager said, her eyes wide with puzzlement.
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br />   “Listen, Alicia, don’t come to the store tomorrow, okay? Stay home and rest.”

  “But who will do the work?”

  Responsible Alicia. Seventeen going on thirty. Joanna dreaded the day she would have to do without her. “I’ll ask Mom to fill in,” Joanna answered.

  “Poor Clova,” the teenager said, her eyes downcast. “She such a nice lady. I don’ mind helping her.”

  “I know. Listen, when you do come in on Monday, pick out a bottle of your favorite fragrance, okay? I’m delivering the eggs, so I won’t be there. Just leave me a note which one you chose. So I can take it off of inventory.”

  Alicia’s face broke into a big grin. “Okay. Sí. I will take Angel. Pablo will be so happy. He like for me to smell good.”

  Joanna drove home thinking about Alicia and her boyfriend. Opposite from Alicia, Pablo Sanchez was a worthless kid who was probably in Alicia’s pants, which didn’t bode well for Joanna’s favorite teenager’s future. For an instant she wondered if she should say something to Alicia, but she quickly put that thought out of her mind. She simply had to stop involving herself in other people’s lives.

  At home, she shoved a Lean Cuisine frozen dinner in the microwave without even looking to see what she would be eating, then sorted her laundry and stuffed a few items into the washer. Dinner turned out to be low-fat lasagna. She ate, then changed into her sleeping clothes and crawled into bed. She didn’t intend to merely nap. She intended to sink into unconsciousness. Mom and the three girls who worked in the beauty salon had done without her all week. They could do without her one more day.

  She snuggled into her pillow with Clova’s son on her mind. Meeting him might have left her baser urges unsettled, but that didn’t keep her from drifting into a deep sleep.

  She awoke a few hours later remembering all that she had to do. She had told Shari and Jay she would meet them at the football game tonight. Their oldest son was a player.

  With Dalton now present to help Clova, Joanna could use tomorrow and Sunday to pack the cartons of eggs she had accumulated into cases and prepare them for delivery to her customers in Lubbock and Amarillo on Monday. Then she could wallow in a payday. She could eat lunch at Tia Maria’s or Pasta House, and she might even drop into a mall and shop.