“I’ll be just a minute,” he called to her. He reached into the space below the gun rack and pulled out a plaid flannel shirt. “In case you’re getting cold.” In a moment he had climbed up beside her and put the shirt around her shoulders.
Jamie tensed as he reached around her, for the protective gesture had startled her, in part because of its unexpected kindliness.
But only in part.
For she had felt again that unmistakable flow of energy, a wave of warmth that closed the small space between them. She’d felt it through her skin. She needed to take a really deep breath, as though to make room inside herself for the sudden flow of feeling that curled deeply into her. Confused by the mixed feelings that were tumbling about inside her—pleasure, desire, and a hefty dose of panic—and needing to conceal her confusion, she turned away from him.
“Thanks,” she said, fumbling to pull the shirt around her. “It does get chilly up here at night. I was beginning to feel cold.” That was certainly a lie—his touch had brought all the warmth she needed—but how could she tell him that? Her mind made a quick twist and she forced herself to remember that they’d come here to look at the view.
“Well, there it is.” She gestured at the valley spread below them, quiet and remote in the moonlight. In the distance, a thin cluster of lights marked the center of town, and across the valley, tiny spots of light were scattered sparsely. An occasional beam from a car’s headlights moved along the highway. She spoke as lightly as she could, trying to ignore the sensations that had just been so unexpectedly roused inside her.
“There it is, folks,” she said. “There’s the hustling, bustling little town of Sharperville you see down there below you, Galena County’s busy downtown metropolis, the red-rock jewel of the nation, cattle capital of the world, and the intermountain west’s answer to New York and Paris.” The wind caught at her hair and she brushed it quickly out of her face. “Where everyone is ‘just folks’ and God help anyone who doesn’t toe the line.”
Cal caught the pain behind her sarcasm.
“You lived here all your life?”
“Every damn minute.”
He scooped up a handful of sandy earth and let it trickle out of his fist.
“I haven’t noticed it seems such a bad place. Didn’t anything good ever happen to you here?”
“Oh, yes.”
But then she was quiet while she stared out over that silent valley, her gaze held by the far-flung lights. The night was vast around her and was stirred only by the rough, pulsing, high-pitched cricket-sound and the gentle whisper of the firs moving in the wind. Far away, the snow-tipped peaks were touched by the moon. A coyote called and she jumped. Then all was silent again except for the crickets and the wind-whisper.
“One good thing happened.”
She felt the whole story rising up, about to be told out loud for the first time, a story she’d carried silently and so painfully for two years. She was astonished that it was happening with this man, this stranger. As though a key had been turned in a lock, as though a door had opened, and she was about to expose her unspeakable shame.
Cal was the best kind of listener. He said nothing; he just kept scooping up handfuls of sand, absent-mindedly, and letting them slide through his fingers. He sensed that he was hearing—in this time and in this place—what had never been told before.
She needed a few moments before she could start—and Cal waited silently.
“I have a little girl. Her name is Mandy—Amanda, actually—and she’s four years old. Four years old this May. Mandy is the good thing that happened. The best thing in the whole world that ever happened to me. The bad part is, her daddy is Ray Nixon. Maybe you know the Nixons. Everyone in Sharperville knows the Nixons. Pillars of the community.”
She made no effort to hide the bitterness in her tone.
“It’s an old story, I guess. I was just so damned young and there was so much I didn’t know. But there was one thing I did know, ever since I was a kid. The ‘good’ people of Sharperville didn’t think much of us Sundstroms. People watch each other pretty close around here and they’ve got this thing—from the Bible, I guess—about visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, or something.”
“Unto the third and fourth generation,” Cal nodded thoughtfully, looking down at the faraway town.
“Well, the sad truth is, my daddy’s a drunk and hasn’t done a days’ worth of real work in his life. And all I got from my mom were my blue eyes and my hair and her family name.”
“What happened to her?” Cal had a feeling he already knew what happened to Jamie’s mom.
“My mom ran off with some trucker from Idaho when I was a baby”—she kept up her brave pose for a moment or two and then she finally let her feeling show—“so I guess my folks really aren’t any good.” She turned away from him, embarrassed. “I don’t know why they turned out the way they did,” she went on quietly. “They both came from real good old Scandinavian stock. The Sundstroms and the Jamissons were well known around here, used to be good, solid people. They settled this part of the country way back, more than a hundred years ago and they worked hard and built up their farms, prosperous places, well-cared for. Everyone knows both families were real respectable. Reliable, hard-working people who went to church on Sunday and knew right from wrong.
“But something must have gone wrong in the later generations. All of them just disappeared, God knows where, and there was nothing left around here of that whole line—both sides—except my dad and me. And that left me, like it says in the Bible, with the sins of my father . . .”
“Oh, Jamie, that isn’t what it says—”
“Well, whatever. My dad never did work the farm and he just lets the house fall down around him. He lives on whatever odd jobs he can pick up around town. When he’s sober, that is. So now the place is an eyesore and, like I’ve heard plenty of times, a ‘disgrace to the community.’ I’ve been hearing that one since I can remember. And some people in this town can be pretty unforgiving. They don’t let you forget.
“Anyway, by the time I got to high school, I was real glad when Ray Nixon started hanging out with me. I figured it would make me look respectable, what with his folks being such upstanding pillars of the community, like I said. Can you imagine I could be so dumb? But I was just a kid and I thought they must be good people, I mean they do their church work regularly and Ervil—he’s Ray’s father—he plays the organ for Sunday morning services. Nobody can touch Edna’s needlework at the county fair and they’re always the ones to see to it that there’s no liquor at the high school dances.”
Jamie’s smirk gave Cal a pretty clear picture of the “good” Nixons.
“You can imagine Edna wasn’t exactly happy when Ray told her we were getting married. She kept prissing up her mouth and whining about how she never would understand that boy. Of all her kids—there were eight of them—he was the wildest of the bunch, she said, always into some sort of trouble, keeping her life a misery. And now here he was marrying Lee Sundstrom’s daughter.”
Jamie’s voice became a whining, sarcastic mimicry of her former mother-in-law. “‘Ever since that no-good wife of his ran off, Lee Sundstrom has just got worse and worse, and that Jamie, that daughter of his, is going to turn out to be no better than her mother, you just mark my words, you see if I ain’t right.’ And then she’d poke Ervil to make him agree with her. ‘Ain’t I right, Ervil? Ain’t I?’ And Ervil always agrees with Edna so he’d nod his head, up and down, obediently. And then she’d point to Ray and say, ‘But there’s never been any stopping that boy from doing whatever he wanted,’ like she thought he was just the cutest damn thing that ever happened.”
“So you and Ray went ahead and got married?”
Jamie shrugged.
“It didn’t seem so stupid at the time. I’d known him ever since kindergarten, and I thought the Nixons were really respectable people. I was too dumb to know that being prissy and small-minded isn’t the s
ame as being decent. It took me a while to figure out that Edna’s front parlor was plenty clean but the spirit inside her was mean.
“So, that very summer, right after we finished high school, we drove over to some little town in Nevada and quick got married and Edna got to tell everyone how her boy had ‘run off with that no-good Sundstrom girl.’”
“So you had no fancy ceremony?”
“No way. There was no one on my side to make a regular wedding, and we knew Edna and Ervil would never approve. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. Like I said, we were so young, we even thought it was kind of a kick in the ass, you know? Be the talk of the whole senior class. I mean, imagine”—she smirked—“I wasn’t even pregnant.
“But it turned out Ray wasn’t just some wild kid. I mean, it wasn’t just high spiritedness, you know. The marriage was in trouble right away—like that’s a big surprise.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, right away Ray got a job at the hydro plant and it seemed like he always had to work crazy hours, and somehow he always needed to be out of town for days at a time. We had this little trailer home—Ray’s still living there now—and it got so I never knew when he’d be coming home. He didn’t care when I told him I was worried or that I didn’t appreciate the way he was treating me. There were all these phone calls at all hours, and meetings with people I didn’t like the looks of. And when I tried to find out what was happening, that’s when things started to get real nasty.”
“He hit you?”
“Sure, he hit me.”
“And you stayed with him?”
“I know it sounds real stupid, but I actually was pregnant by then. I’d already figured out things weren’t likely to work out, but I guess I was so miserable and so confused, I thought having a baby would make us a real family.” She needed to stop. The memories—and the shame—hurt too much, and she felt the tears starting. And she was not going to cry in front of this cowboy, and she needed a moment to get her brave face back on.
Cal understood. He stayed quiet so she could continue when she was ready.
“But honestly, Cal. No matter how bad all the rest turned out, having Mandy was wonderful. She’s the greatest little girl. I just don’t see how someone so wonderful can come from Ray Nixon. Must have been something good left over from my side.
“Anyway, I thought I was somehow going to make it all work out—for her sake, you know? That’s another dumb old story . . .” with both hands she gestured the futility, the frustration.
“And it didn’t work out that way, did it?”
“Does it ever?”
“Not as I’ve ever seen. So what finally happened?”
For a long time, she stared into the darkness while the moon climbed higher above their heads. The crickets filled the night with their sandpaper music, and far below them, in the valley, the lights of a car moved along the highway. She didn’t speak again until it disappeared into the dark.
“Things just kept getting worse between us. I knew something was going on—though to this day, I still don’t know what he was up to. There were a lot of people coming and going in that little trailer, and he was making all these trips and not telling me where he’d been, just telling me to shut up and quit asking questions. He was getting nastier and meaner and, after a while, I couldn’t stand to be around him. I decided to get a job, get out of the house more.
“That’s when I started to work down at the feed store. I got Ray’s mom to take care of Mandy during the day while I worked. I really needed to get away from Ray and I liked earning my own money. And for her part, Edna liked having Mandy under her wing, so she could be a ‘good influence’ on her and see to her spiritual life, but I figured Mandy was still too young for Edna to do her any harm or to turn her against me.
“The trouble was, the more independent I became, the madder Ray got. And the madder Ray got, the rougher he got, and the rougher he got, the more I started staying away from home whenever I could. At night, after work, I’d pick Mandy up from her Grandma’s and we’d go get a hamburger or something instead of going home for dinner.
“Then, one Friday night, we got back to the trailer later than usual, maybe around eight o’clock. We came in and Ray was there and so was this girl. Tina.”
It felt so strange, the whole story pouring out of her, and now she couldn’t help the burning tears that came with it.
“The trailer was dark and I thought Ray was working the night shift. Mandy had run on ahead of me—I can still see her, waving that little lunch box she always took to Grandma’s—and I got in just behind her and turned on the light, and there they were on the sofa, Ray and Tina, and there wasn’t a stitch of clothes on either of them. Ray grabbed his pants and Tina was laughing like she was having high old time, looking right at me and laughing!
“That did it. I started to yell that I’d had it, that I wasn’t going to take anymore. I said, ‘I’m taking Mandy and I’m walking out of here right now!” But Ray was too fast, and as soon as I said I was taking Mandy, he grabbed her by the arm and practically threw her behind him and yelled at me like he was going to kill me. ‘You think you’re just going to up and walk out on me? No way, baby. No one walks out on me. You do any walking, it’ll be when I tell you to!’ Mandy was crying by then, and he yelled at her to get to her bed or he’d really whack her and she was so terrified, she ran away into the bedroom where her crib was, at the other end of the trailer.
Jamie turned her head away from Cal, shaking her head as though to rub the scene out of her memory. “She was still carrying that little lunch box.”
She couldn’t speak for a few moments, just holding her hand over her mouth, and Cal waited silently. Finally, she wiped her tears from her cheeks.
“I tried to run past Ray, to get to Mandy, but he threw me back against the door and I could hear the glass breaking. I punched at him and I was screaming at him to cut it out and my foot slipped and I was just grabbing at anything I could and he was yelling, ‘Just get the hell outta here, bitch! Just get the hell outta here!’ And he was dragging me to the door and I was pounding on him and I could hear Mandy crying. I managed to hit him once really hard in the mouth, so he was bleeding down onto his shirt”—by now the words were rushing from her—“and I kept yelling ‘Just let me get Mandy!’ He kept saying, ‘No one walks out on me!’ and he kicked at the screen door so it came loose off the hinges and he threw me so hard I couldn’t catch my balance, and I landed in the dirt outside the trailer.
“I was so scared, and I was bleeding, and I ran for my car and all I could hear was Mandy crying from the bedroom and Ray still yelling, ‘You hear me, you bitch!’ Only his language was a lot uglier than that. ‘You ain’t walking out on me ’cause I just threw you out! And I don’t want to see you around here! You understand that, bitch?’ And he was slamming the door again and again, so the rest of the glass fell out, and he was yelling, ‘Go on! Go back to that no-good father of yours! See how much good he does you!’”
The pain was too much and she needed to stop. She ducked her head against her shoulder to hide her face from Cal so he couldn’t see as she brushed at the tears. He waited silently, letting her have the time she needed. A full minute passed before she could go on.
“So I came up here, like I always do. All the way, all I could think was how Mandy was crying for me—that and the disgusting sight of Tina, laughing at us.
“I knew there was no use anymore trying to keep the marriage together. I was just sitting here—right here where we are right now—just looking out over everything—and it was a Friday night, just like tonight”—she waved a hand vaguely toward the town—“and I tried to figure out what I had to do.
“But Ray was already a couple of steps ahead of me. I stayed at my dad’s house over the weekend and on Monday morning I drove over to the county seat, in Flintlock, to try to find a lawyer. That’s when I found out that Ray had already filed a divorce complaint against me. Can you imagine?
I never knew it, but Ray already had a lawyer, and they just got together over the weekend, and first thing Monday morning, that lawyer of his was in court, claiming I was an unfit mother.”
She was staring blankly into the valley as though the whole awful memory was playing itself out there, below her.
“At first I thought he was just trying to hassle me, you know? Make me miserable. I knew he wasn’t really interested in having custody of Mandy. But there was more to it than that. It was his mom, Edna, sticking her nose into the whole mess. What she really wanted was for Mandy to be with her. She never approved of me and she saw a chance to do some more of her famous ‘good works.’ His lawyer got a court order, keeping me from seeing Mandy until the divorce hearing, and that suited Ray just fine. He handed Mandy over to Edna so he wouldn’t have to be bothered taking care of her and he got to drive me crazy at the same time.”
“But how could he get away with that?”
“Cal, you know how things work in these small towns. Everyone knows everyone and the Nixons are the kind they call ‘fine, upstanding people.’ And the judge was Edna’s sister’s father-in-law. Judge Joyner. Judge Whitaker S. Joyner. Like I’ll ever forget him. He’s dead now. About six months ago. Too bad it didn’t happen a whole lot sooner.”
She sucked in her breath, ashamed of her bitterness, ashamed to realize how poisonous she sounded. But there was no taking it back. The pain was too great, and she was letting Cal see it all.
“You should have seen the order he wrote. It’s right there”—she couldn’t control the sarcasm—“about how a mother who’s out of the home every day, working in an office, when she should be with her little child, wasn’t providing a ‘properly stable environment’ or a ‘suitable role model and moral standard’. He said I was negligent, leaving my little girl in the care of others, failing to perform my maternal duties. The whole thing is so full of that kind of stuff. Hell, I’ve read it over so many times, I know it by heart!”
“But what about your lawyer? Didn’t he fight for you?”
A Cowboy's Love Page 5
