The Pioneer Woman

by Ree Drummond

  But we would eventually have to go home. Marlboro Man had a ranch to run—it would soon be time to ship more cattle—and besides that, renovation on our yellow brick house was going strong. We’d have to go home eventually, away from the days spent in bed, and begin our new life together in the country.

  It was the middle of the night in the Blue Mountains when the phone rang in our hotel room. Marlboro Man and I jumped, unaware of what time it was in Australia or any other part of the world, for that matter. I couldn’t even open my eyes. The mist outside had proven itself an intoxicating elixir.

  “Hello?” Marlboro Man said. I could hear a man’s voice through the receiver.

  Moments passed, and I drifted back to sleep…until Marlboro Man sat up in bed and swung his legs around so his feet touched the ground.

  “Damn, Slim,” he said. “That’s sure not good.”

  I opened my eyes. I had no idea what he could be talking about.

  I listened to Marlboro Man as he continued what appeared to be an intense discussion with his brother. It was business-related. And it didn’t sound like good news.

  “Okay, Slim,” he said. “Call me when you find out more.”

  Marlboro Man settled back under the covers. I heard him sigh.

  “Everything okay?” I said sleepily, wrapping my leg back around his.

  “Oh…,” he said, rolling over and adjusting his pillow. “Grain markets took a big dive today.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was tired or stressed…or a little of both. But I could tell from his voice alone that the news had been unexpected.

  I tossed and turned for a while before finally drifting off to sleep and dreaming about our wedding, my parents, our yellow Indian house, and our Land Cruiser from hell.

  Our drive to the Gold Coast the next day was quiet. Marlboro Man had had another phone call with Tim before we’d pulled away from the hotel, and the situation sounded pretty dire. Corn and wheat prices were plummeting, and Marlboro Man was a continent away, unable to keep track of the situation and manage his commodity account, which was a hedge against the wild swings of the cattle market. He wanted to talk, to enjoy our continued drive north. But he was simply too preoccupied to engage in small talk. He had a new wife, a new house, a new homestead…and a mere week after his wedding day, what he thought was a secure situation back home was becoming more precarious with each phone call from his brother, Tim. I had no idea what to say or do; I didn’t want to put on a happy face and ignore the fact that something heavy was going down; on the other hand, I didn’t want to make it worse by asking him about it every five minutes.

  Of all the things that had happened, this was the most peculiar honeymoon development.

  WE CHECKED into our beachfront hotel, putting the stresses back home aside long enough to walk down the beach and have an early lobster dinner at a casual seaside shack. Marlboro Man and I shared a lobster tail larger than most cows back on the ranch, and I took the liberty of ordering a warm lobster casserole as a side dish. We’d be heading back to Oklahoma soon; I wasn’t leaving Australia without ingesting all the lobster I could.

  I burped quietly as we walked back to our resort. There was a lot of lobster in my belly.

  By the time we returned to the hotel room, we were laughing again. Marlboro Man was teasing me about how many clothes I’d brought on the honeymoon, and I’d punched him in the arm; he, in turn, had trapped me in the corner of the elevator and tickled me, and I’d threatened to wet my pants if he didn’t stop. And I wasn’t kidding; I’d had a glass of wine at dinner, as well as two Diet Cokes. Tickling me in an elevator wouldn’t be a good idea for very long.

  The blinking message light on the phone screamed at us when we walked into the bedroom of our suite. Marlboro Man audibly exhaled, clearly wishing the world—and his brother and the grain markets and the uncertainties of agriculture—would leave us alone already. I wished they’d leave us alone, too.

  In light of the recent developments, though, Marlboro Man picked up the phone and dialed Tim to get an update. I excused myself to the bathroom to freshen up and put on a champagne satin negligee in an effort to thwart the external forces that were trying to rob me of my husband’s attention. I brushed my teeth and spritzed myself with Jil Sander perfume before opening the door to the bedroom, where I would seduce my Marlboro Man away from his worries. I knew I could win if only I applied myself.

  He was just getting off the phone when I entered the room.

  “Dammit,” I heard him mumble as he plopped down onto the enormous king-size bed.

  Oh no. Jil Sander had her work cut out for her.

  I climbed on the bed and lay beside him, resting my head on his arm. He draped his arm across my waist. I draped my leg around his.

  He sighed. “The markets are totally in the shitter.”

  I didn’t know the details, but I did know the shitter wasn’t a good place.

  I wanted to throw out the usual platitudes. Don’t worry about it, try not to think about it, we’ll figure it out, everything will be okay. But I didn’t know enough about it. I knew he and his brother owned a lot of land. I knew they worked hard to pay for it. I knew they weren’t lawyers or physicians by profession and didn’t have a whole separate income to supplement their ranching operation. As full-time ranchers, their livelihoods were completely reliant on so many things outside of their control—weather, market fluctuations, supply, demand, luck. I knew they weren’t home free in terms of finances—Marlboro Man and I had talked about it. But I didn’t understand enough about the ramifications of this current wrinkle to reassure him that everything would be okay, businesswise. And he probably didn’t want me to.

  So I did the only thing I could think of to do. I assured my new husband everything would be okay between us by leaning over, turning off the lamp, and letting the love between us—which had zero to do with markets or grains—take over.

  WE WOKE up two hours later vomiting, violently ill with what had to be food poisoning, the lobster exacting a violent revenge. The only saving grace was that the hotel suite also had a half bath; I elected to hole up in there while Marlboro Man splayed out in the master bath, both of us wondering all the while how a perfectly wonderful honeymoon could have gone so horribly south.

  If I hadn’t been so busy staring at the ceiling and wishing death would rescue me, I would have laughed hysterically. This had to be one of the most hilariously tragic honeymoons on record.

  Not that it was the least bit funny.

  Thirty-six hours later, we were on a plane back to the States. After an entire day of vomiting, diarrhea, and profuse sweating—not to mention my inner ear disturbance, the Griswold Family car rental, and the disintegrating nest egg back home—I’d told Marlboro Man I thought we should cut the trip short and head home, where we could decompress and unpack and rest…and think clearly. I didn’t want my new husband to have the added stress of having to put on a happy face all the way up the coast to the Great Barrier Reef; three whole weeks in Australia weren’t a prerequisite to our starting our life together.

  “We’ll come back sometime,” I said during our layover in Auckland. And I meant it. For all the ridiculous developments of the previous week, I’d seen enough of Australia to know that I wanted to come back, albeit under less psychotic circumstances.

  When we touched down back home Marlboro Man inhaled and exhaled deeply, as if deep down he knew the extent of the struggle awaiting him two hours from the airport, at the ranch where he’d grown up…on the land that he and his family loved so very much.

  I exhaled, too, realizing at that very moment that we’d just officially crossed the line into the big, fat, real world.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  HOME ON THE RANGE

  TIM WAS waiting for us at baggage claim; he greeted us with a semi-forced smile, shaking Marlboro Man’s hand and patting him on the arm reassuringly. My new brother-in-law hugged me warmly and said welcome home, but I could see his worry in the air; it
was thick and murky and charcoal gray, like an erupting ash cloud. The ride back to the ranch was mostly quiet, peppered with occasional anecdotes of our vomit-filled honeymoon and debriefings from Tim as to the gravity of the situation with the markets. They stayed in the moment, purposely avoiding the what-ifs and what-will-we-dos—concentrating instead on trying to get a grasp on how everything could have taken such a plunge in such a tiny breath of a moment. And—considering it came on the heels of such a celebratory, blessed event—how funny the timing was.

  The sun was just dipping below the western horizon when we pulled up to our little house on the prairie. Despite the obvious turmoil I knew was swarming in the periphery, I couldn’t help but instantly smile when I saw our little home. Home, I thought to myself—a strange response, considering I’d never spent a night there. But, being back there, I felt the heartbeat of our love affair that had started on that very ranch, the drives we’d taken, the dinners we’d cooked, the nights we’d spent watching submarine movies on his old leather couch, which Marlboro Man had already moved to our new little house so we’d be able to enjoy it immediately.

  Poor couch. It must have been awfully lonely without us.

  Tim bid us good-bye after helping us carry in my three-hundred-pound suitcase, and Marlboro Man and I looked around our quiet house, which was spick-and-span and smelled of fresh paint and leather cowboy boots, which lined the wall near the front door. The entry glowed with the light of the setting sun coming in the window, and I reached down to grab one of my bags so I could carry it to the bedroom. But before my hand made it to the handle, Marlboro Man grabbed me tightly around the waist and carried me over to the leather sofa, where we fell together in a tired heap of jet lag, emotional exhaustion, and—ironically, given the week we’d just endured—a sudden burst of lust.

  “Welcome home,” he said, nuzzling his face into my neck. Mmmm. This was a familiar feeling.

  “Thank you,” I said, closing my eyes and savoring every second. As his lips made their way across my neck, I could hear the sweet and reassuring sound of cows in the pasture east of our house. We were home.

  “You feel so good,” he said, moving his hands to the zipper of my casual black jacket.

  “You do, too,” I said, stroking the back of his closely cut hair as his arms wrapped more and more tightly around my waist. “But…uh…” I paused.

  My black jacket was by now on the floor.

  “I…uh…,” I continued. “I think I need to take a shower.” And I did. I couldn’t do the precise calculation of what it had meant for my hygiene to cross back over the international date line, but as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t showered in a decade. I couldn’t imagine christening our house in such a state. I needed to smell like lilac and lavender and Dove soap on the first night in our little house together. Not airline fuel. Not airports. Not clothes I’d worn for two days straight.

  Marlboro Man chuckled—the first one I’d heard in many days—and as he’d done so many times during our months of courtship, he touched his forehead to mine. “I need one, too,” he said, a hint of mischief in his voice.

  And with that, we accompanied each other to the shower, where, with a mix of herbal potions, rural water, and determination, we washed our honeymoon down the drain.

  I’M SORRY about our honeymoon,” Marlboro Man said when we woke up the next morning. It was 4:30, still dark outside, and we were wired, our internal clocks in a state of utter confusion. He caressed my side as I stretched and sighed. Our bed was so warm and cozy and dreamy.

  “It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “I’m so glad we came home…I love it here.” Our bedroom was tiny, about nine feet by nine feet. It cradled us like a protective cocoon.

  “I love you here,” he replied.

  We stayed in bed the entire morning, purposely denying that a world beyond our cocoon even existed.

  MARLBORO MAN and I settled in together, soaking up the first days of married life on the ranch that was my new home. He spent his days working cattle; his evenings figuring out the business ramifications of the imploding financial situation in which he and Tim now found themselves. I, on the other hand, spent my days getting organized and washing his muddy clothes, failing miserably in my attempts to remove the greenish brown manure stains and making plans instead to order a hundred pairs of the jeans he wore so I could just replace them every day. I saw no other alternative.

  I unpacked my clothes gradually, hanging them in the tiny closet that Marlboro Man and I now shared and folding what wouldn’t fit in under-the-bed storage boxes. The myriad skin scrubs and facial creams and lotions I’d collected over the previous few years now filled my half of the large wooden medicine cabinet that hung on the bathroom wall over the single pedestal sink; my cookbooks—old and new—took their place on the shelves above the kitchen pantry.

  We had no place to put the stacks of wedding gifts we’d received—the silver trays and crystal goblets and pewter meat platters. Marlboro Man’s mother came over to help me pack and consolidate it all for storage in the separate garage apartment adjacent to the yellow brick house—whose renovation plowed along daily.

  In the evening time, I’d try to acclimate myself to the new kitchen setup: a four-burner portable gas range, a single-bowl stainless sink, a sparkly new economy-size fridge. I’d picked out a charming tile with watercolor cows sectioned off according to the cuts of beef, and all the words were in French—a last-ditch effort on my part to be worldly. The word BOEUF peppered our countertops. It made Marlboro Man laugh.

  On our sixth night home, after subsisting mostly on cold sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, I boiled a chicken in the new Calphalon stockpot I’d received as a gift from my old college roommate, Jill, removing it with stainless tongs given to me by the mother of a childhood friend. When it was cool enough to handle, I meticulously picked the meat off the bone, unsure of how much fat and gristle to leave behind. I’d decided to inaugurate our kitchen with my mom’s Chicken Spaghetti, a comfort food I thought would hit the spot in our first week home. Cooking the spaghetti, I combined it with the chicken and added onions, green peppers, and pimientos from a jar. And to seal the deal as a domestic goddess, I added cream of mushroom soup, holding the two open cans over the mixing bowl for a good minute before the solidified soup finally plopped out, both in a cylindrical mass. Adding a splash of broth and a bunch of grated sharp cheddar, I stirred it to mix it up, seasoned it with salt and cayenne, then baked it in an earthenware pottery dish, courtesy of my mother-in-law’s first cousin. As it baked, the blessed casserole smelled just like it did when I was a child, which was likely the last time I’d eaten it. I marveled that the scent of a specific dish could remain in one’s consciousness for over two decades. Except for the dark brown hair and the crumbling marriage, I’d officially become my mother.

  Marlboro Man, happy to have something warm to eat, declared it the best thing he’d ever eaten. I looked at the mess in the kitchen and felt like moving.

  Marlboro Man and I watched movies that night. Our TV satellite hadn’t been hooked up yet, so he’d transported his movie collection and VCR from his old house. And I didn’t have to get up and drive home when they were over, because I already was home.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK

  FIVE WEEKS to the day after our wedding, we drove to my hometown to have dinner with my parents, who wanted to welcome us back from the honeymoon with a nice dinner at the country club. I hugged my mom and dad, and shuddered; the familiar tension between them was present and palpable. Clearly nothing had improved since I’d said good-bye to them at the wedding reception.

  Somehow, during the course of the previous several weeks, amid the honeymoon and the settling in and the fizzy first days of matrimony, I’d allowed myself to assume that since I was no longer a daily witness to the unraveling of my parents’ marriage, it must not actually be happening.

  Thirty seconds in their presence blew that completely out of the wat
er.

  We ordered steak and baked potatoes and salads and desserts, but, strangely, by the second bite of steak, I knew I couldn’t go on any longer. The thought of the piece of meat in front of me suddenly repelled me, and I was instantly transported to the nausea spell I’d experienced at the best restaurant in all of Sydney. Oh no, I thought. It’s back. I didn’t say anything, continuing to pick at the food in front of me as Marlboro Man and I shared the more pleasant aspects of our Australian honeymoon.

  When we hugged good-bye and I watched my parents climb into their car—my mother immediately staring out the window as my father shifted into drive and stared straight ahead—I knew in my heart things had gotten worse. The pit of my stomach ached in more ways than one.

  As Marlboro Man and I walked to our car, his arm around my shoulders and my head resting on his chest, I held him tightly, promising myself I’d never let that coldness take root between us. I couldn’t even bear the thought, couldn’t even imagine it. I loved Marlboro Man so much. Had my parents ever felt that way? I know they had. I’d seen it. I clutched Marlboro Man even tighter as we continued our walk through the parking lot.

  We drove home slowly, almost in utter silence. I knew Marlboro Man was preoccupied; the business of the ranch weighed heavily on his mind. As for me, all I could think about were my parents and my stupid inner ear disturbance, which had clearly chosen to pay me a visit that night. I was sick again, just like I’d been for most of our Australian honeymoon.

  And then it really hit me.

  “Stop the car,” I said suddenly, just before we crossed the county line. Before the pickup even came to a complete stop, I opened my door and hopped out, throwing up my dinner, completely splattering the shoulder of the highway.