Sweet Return

by Anna Jeffrey

  “Joanna,” Jay said as the three of them walked to the parking lot, “what ever happened to that Scott dude you were hanging out with?”

  She gave an unladylike snort. “He was the last straw. Thanks to him, I gave up on men.”

  “I told you that,” Shari said to her husband.

  “I must’ve forgot,” Jay said.

  “You never listen to a word I say, Jay Huddleston.”

  “Shari, you say so damn many words, my ears can’t sort ’em all out. Listen,” he said to Joanna, “when you see ol’ Dalton again, tell him to come by my shop and I’ll give him a beer or a cup of coffee. I can’t remember the last time I saw that guy.”

  “If I ever talk to him again, I’ll be sure to tell him,” Joanna grumbled.

  The thought of seeing Dalton again held zero appeal. In fact, she would like to figure out a way to avoid him until he departed for California.

  At eleven Dalton decided to turn in. It was early for him. Back in California, it was only nine o’clock. He went to bed in the room where he had slept in his youth. Faded floral wallpaper, filmy white curtains, a paper window shade.

  The smell of dust and disuse surrounded him. If he had to guess, he would say he lay on the same lumpy, sagging mattress on which he had slept the last time he visited several years back, the same one that had been his as a kid. Only now it felt worse. Back when he was a teenager, he had slid a piece of plywood between the mattress and the box spring to make the bed firmer. That was more than twenty years ago. Of course the plywood had been removed.

  Hell, he should just get a new bed. In fact, he could easily do that while he was in Lubbock tomorrow.

  Working on the fence all afternoon had worn on him, too, but not in a bad way. Most work around the ranch, any ranch, was physically demanding, but he had never minded. Besides liking the cattle, he liked the outdoors, liked the physical exertion.

  His thoughts veered to his mother. His feeling for her was a confused mixture of affection and resentment—respect for her role in giving him life, but bitterness because she had chosen Earl Cherry’s happiness and welfare over that of either of her sons. And after she had demonstrated so much unflinching loyalty, Cherry hadn’t even been faithful to her. The son of a bitch had fucked around with women all over the county and even in Lovington. Dalton had known it even as a kid, had seen women in the truck with Earl. His mother had known, too, but ignored it or made excuses for it. Of the many things about her that Dalton had never understood, number one on the list was her relationship with Cherry.

  He was stunned that she had hocked the friggin’ land, the bedrock of any ranching operation. It might be too late to do much about that, but he could manage a solution to the tax problem. Monday, he would go to the courthouse and simply write a check. Catching up the taxes would lift some pressure.

  He had always believed that someday the ranch would belong to him and Lane, though he, personally, had never longed for it or felt it was owed to him. Still, seeing the chickens was a brutal reminder of how quickly things could change. Hell, even if his mother got out of this financial bind, she could get married again, and as capricious as she had always been with her feelings for her sons, she could give the whole damn place to her new husband.

  Dalton had had the latter thought before, which he had used as a reason not to invest his own funds in the place. Even by paying the taxes, he could well be pouring money down a rat hole. He wasn’t stingy, but he didn’t like wasting money.

  So was selling the place the long-term solution? When it came to the nut cutting, he doubted Mom would do it. Generations of Parker ancestors were buried in the old family cemetery a few miles from the house. That had meaning to a family that had endured prejudice and discrimination for all of the years the Parker Comanche ancestors had. Dalton hadn’t experienced those offenses himself, but he knew his grandparents had.

  He began to sink into the well of sleep, making a plan for tomorrow. Return the rental car, take his mother with him to the hospital, talk to Lane’s doctor. From looking at the kid, Dalton suspected he could be laid up for a long time.

  Following the hospital visit, he and Mom would pick up some fence-mending supplies and he would find a place to buy a new bed. Then he had to find a Best Buy or somewhere to pick up some computer peripherals. He had brought his laptop and his drivers and software with him. The quiet nights would be perfect for choosing and editing the photographs he had shot overseas. Regardless of what else happened, he couldn’t forget he had promised his editor he would have no problem meeting his deadline on his next book of photographs.

  Two hours later, he was wide awake, lying in a pool of sweat, his heart pounding in his ears. The nightmare, a horror filled with chaos, Technicolor images of rubble and blood and scattered body parts, did that to him. He heard the human screams and wails, the screeching sirens. He smelled the stench of cordite lingering in the air.

  He sat up, swinging his feet to the floor, mentally and emotionally fighting his way back to the reality of being in a safe place. The dream didn’t come every night, but once it had awakened him, he usually remained sleepless and strung out for an hour or two or even a whole night. He rubbed his eyes and sat there a few minutes, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. Finally, he looked at his watch, which he could read in the dark. Midnight in LA.

  The clean smell of the dewy rangeland and the steady saw of crickets drifted in through two tall open windows. He didn’t sleep with the windows open in his Los Angeles house. He didn’t dare. But in this house, the open windows were a necessity. Built some years before 1900, the house had no ducted air-conditioning system. As a kid, Dalton had scarcely noticed. When temperatures rose to sweltering in late summer and early fall, his mother and Earl put swamp coolers in a couple of the windows. They turned them on only during the hottest part of the day.

  No question in Dalton’s mind, his rugged youth had conditioned him to survive in the desert. Growing up, he had spent his days outdoors, too tired by night to let the temperature affect him. Endurance was a mental thing anyway. He had learned that much in the Marine Corps and from the GIs in Iraq. Even with the temperature at 130 degrees, those kids slogged around the desert covered by pounds of clothing, carrying pounds of equipment.

  The open windows and the cooler outside temperature didn’t keep the room from being stuffy. He rose, pulled on his shirt and jeans and slid his feet into his boots. He stole from the room, through the house and out onto the front porch, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets against the cool of the night.

  A three-quarter moon and a billion stars in a velvet sky stained the landscape silver. The long white caliche driveway stretched ahead of him like a pale ribbon leading to the highway. Far out on the horizon several columns of the bright white lights of oil derricks shimmered like skinny Christmas trees against the black sky.

  Nothing stirred. From a great distance he heard the call of a whippoorwill. The familiar sound brought back his childhood for a flicker of memory, but to this day, as familiar as the sound was to his ear, as far as he knew, he had never seen one of those friggin’ birds.

  From an even greater distance, the shrill bark of coyotes pierced the night…. Coyotes? Hell, yes, coyotes. Why weren’t they out there in that nasty damn chicken yard feasting on those fuckin’ chickens?

  He stepped off the porch and walked over to the fenced pasture where the stinking damned things lived. He could see the silhouettes of at least four coops made of weathered plywood, and he presumed chickens roosted in all of them. The jackasses stood together beneath a small open shed that looked like a bunch of junk lumber had been thrown together. Tobacco road. Shit. How could his mother do this to the ranch?

  If you were so concerned about what she might be doing in your lengthy absence, perhaps you should have come home. Or at the very least, made a phone call and pretended you cared what happens to her and to this place.

  Joanna Walsh’s words pushed their way into his head. He couldn’t argue
with what she had said to him about his approach to his family, but he hated being reminded by an outsider that he had given his mom, his brother or Texas little thought and even less time.

  Who the hell was this Walsh woman, anyway? And why couldn’t he remember her from school? She had been flitting in and out of his space and his mind all day. Not because she was his type, for damn sure. There was something else about her that gnawed at him.

  With shiny brown-red hair and expressive green eyes, she was sort of pretty in a wholesome way. Not a knockout like, say, Candace, but her ass did do wonders for a pair of tight jeans. Lean and mean, he labeled her.

  Still, despite the stir her appearance had caused within him, his cursory opinion was that she might be too pushy and too damn smart for her own good. Or for his own good. God save him from smart women.

  Then it dawned on him—the thing about her that bothered him, the thing that kept bringing her back into his mind, other than her friggin’ chickens. She seemed not to like him. Women rarely failed to like him. More females than he could manage had always been easy to coax into bed. The Walsh woman, on the other hand, seemed to want to escape from him, a fact that only made him more curious about her.

  He strolled up the caliche driveway, watching the drilling rig lights and how the aura they created flickered erratically against the black sky. All at once it came to him that those distant columns of bright lights were sending him a message. A memory from his youth hurtled back. The oil well that had been drilled on Parker land had been near the house. There had been trucks and noise and excitement. But he couldn’t recall the well’s exact location, and no one had ever told him why it wasn’t developed.

  Jesus Christ, the solution to the Parker ranch’s financial problems could be right under his feet. Oil. In the great Permian Basin, with oil wells everywhere, in every direction he looked, and with drilling resurging, surely to God, somewhere under seventeen sections of land, a drop or two of crude oil waited to be found.

  The next morning, when Joanna arrived at the Parker ranch she found it eerily quiet. Not a soul could be seen. The rental car was gone from the driveway and Clova’s big green Dodge dually was missing from its usual spot under the shed. No doubt she had gone to the hospital in Lubbock to visit Lane, but the rental car’s absence was puzzling. Had Dalton already returned to California?

  Thank God. He wasn’t doing any good here anyway.

  Yet, even as that presumption jelled into certainty and a sense of relief passed through her, a splinter of disappointment pricked her. Only now that he was gone could she dare admit, if only silently, that he was an extremely attractive man who had awakened urges she had thought dormant. Why that would happen with someone she didn’t like she couldn’t understand.

  After processing the eggs, she returned to downtown and her shop, determined to have a productive day without being distracted by Clova’s family.

  Typically, Saturdays were busy in both the beauty salon and the beauty supply business. Having given Alicia the weekend off, Joanna knew she would be tied down in her shop all day, so she decided to make the most of the time. She dove into a thorough cleaning of the retail half of the business, allowed Tammy, one of the hairdressers, to add some gold highlights to her auburn hair, and talked to several retailers on the phone, making arrangements for egg deliveries in Lubbock and Amarillo on Monday.

  At the end of the day, she was tired, but she had worked herself into an upbeat mood. With Toby Keith blaring from the radio, she drove out to the Parker ranch for the evening egg gathering. Once there, she saw the green dually parked in the driveway, but no rental car. So the long-distance son really had left. A tension she had carried inside for a week melted away.

  She parked behind the dually, noticing a thick, round bundle of steel fence posts in the bed, along with a box of fence staples and other assorted cardboard boxes. Clova must have decided to hire someone to work on the fence. Expecting to find her friend alone, Joanna rapped on the ranch house’s front door and stepped into the living room at the same time. “Clova? It’s me, Joanna.”

  She looked across her left shoulder into the dining room, and there at the dining table sat Dalton. Damn. Where was the rental car?

  A laptop computer was open on the table, with assorted cardboard boxes and packing materials strewn all over the tabletop around it. Joanna almost gasped her surprise—and frustration.

  He looked up and removed a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. “Mom’s in her bedroom. She isn’t feeling well.” He raised a longneck bottle of beer, tilted his head back and chugged a long swig, exposing those powerful neck muscles working with every swallow.

  Joanna swallowed, too, and caught herself staring. Why did he have to be so damn…so damn macho? Even sitting behind a computer and wearing glasses, he was just…just plain damn macho! “Oh,” she said, recovering.

  At the same time, she remembered that back in the spring, Clova had spent four days in the Wacker County Hospital. A burst of concern flared. She took a step toward the older woman’s bedroom, then remembered this wasn’t her house. “Uh, okay if I go back there?” she asked Dalton.

  He leveled a steady look at her, his beer bottle poised midair. Finally, he said, “Sure.”

  Chapter 10

  Joanna crossed the living room to the hallway, feeling his eyes on her back with every step. At Clova’s bedroom door, she tapped lightly with her knuckle. Hearing an invitation to come in, she eased the door open, poked her head through the crack and saw Clova, wearing a faded cotton nightgown, crawling into bed. “Clova? Sweetie, Dalton said you aren’t feeling good.”

  She walked on into the room and closed the door behind her, enclosing the two of them in a frilly, feminine sanctuary. She had always been fascinated that Clova’s bedroom decor was so different from what anyone who knew her only by sight would imagine. Floral wallpaper, lace curtains and jars and pots of lotions and creams on top of a tall armoire. Joanna had often wondered whether the bedroom represented who Clova really was or perhaps who she longed to be.

  “Oh, I ain’t sick,” the older woman said. “I’m just worn out is all.” She proceeded to straighten an obviously old handmade quilt around her legs. “Sit down, sit down.” She patted the mattress in an indication for Joanna to take a seat on the edge. “Me and Dalton got outta bed and went up to Lubbock real early and run all over the place gettin’ stuff done. Havin’ him around keeps me busy.”

  As if she weren’t busy anyway, Joanna thought. “You saw Lane, of course. How is he?”

  Clova looked down at her calloused hands and nodded. A tear fell on her thumb.

  Doom and gloom. Learning that Dalton hadn’t left after all might have been a surprise and a disappointment to Joanna, but not enough to darken her good mood. Seeing Clova again in tears over Lane did the trick. She sighed. “What did they say?”

  Clova turned her head and looked toward the window. The yellowed shade was pulled down, so there was nothing to see but it and limp lace curtains. “Dalton chased down that foreign doctor that’s takin’ care o’ Lane. Ever’where you look nowadays, the hospitals are fillin’ up with foreigners. I don’t know what the world’s a-comin’ to.”

  “What did he say?”

  Clova’s head shook slowly. Her eyes squeezed shut and she pressed a knobby knuckle to her mouth. Joanna plucked a tissue from a box on the bedside table and handed it to her. “Tell me what he said, okay?”

  Clova returned her eyes to the drawn window shade. “Lane’s gonna be a cripple, Joanna. His left leg’s over an inch shorter than it was. I don’t know exactly what caused it, but that doctor said it was so messed up, that was the best he could do.”

  Joanna swallowed the clot of tears that rushed to her own throat. She couldn’t imagine the good-looking, happy-go-lucky, always-grinning Lane limping for the rest of his life. Or walking with a cane. Of course the information was no huge surprise. Joanna still remembered what she had heard the surgeon say the night of the accident. She supposed Lan
e could count himself lucky he still had the leg, even if it was shorter. “Oh, Clova. I’m so sorry.”

  Clova blew her nose on the tissue. “I don’t know how many times I told him about gettin’ in that truck and roarin’ around the highways drunk. He’s lucky, I guess, he hasn’t killed hisself.”

  Or someone else, Joanna thought.

  “He would o’ been better off joinin’ the army like Dalton done. Maybe they could o’ straightened him out.”

  Joanna only nodded, attempting to digest what kind of new problems having a crippled alcoholic around the ranch would generate. “Is he okay otherwise? I mean his other injuries—”

  “They’re gonna move him out of that intensive care place on Monday.” She shrugged and looked down at the tissue wadded into a ball in her hand. “Good thing. No tellin’ what that’s costin’.”

  Joanna nodded again. “I suppose he’ll be taking physical therapy, right?”

  “I don’t know. We ain’t got any instructions yet. Or a plan, either.”

  Chaos and confusion seemed to be the norm with Clova, but Joanna mustered a smile. “Look, it’s suppertime. Have you eaten?”

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  “What if I went into the kitchen and made a pot of soup? It’s kind of chilly out. Cool enough for me to turn on the lightbulbs in the chicken coops. Soup sounds good, doesn’t it? I know I’m not much of a cook, but I can manage soup.”

  Clova looked up at her, her cheeks wet with tears. “You’re a good woman, Joanna. Havin’ you for a friend means a lot to me. I know I’m a burden to you. I don’t mean to be, but seems like I got troubles ever’ time I turn around these days. Don’t bother cookin’ no soup for me. Dalton’s out there puttin’ that machine together. If I get hungry, maybe I can get him to fix me somethin’.”

  “Nonsense. I don’t consider you a burden.”

  Clova leaned forward, looked closer at Joanna’s forehead. “What happened to your head, hon?”