Bridge To Happiness

by Jill Barnett

  I stared down at my hands. “You must think I’m nuts. Here I assume you’re not attached. I try to set you up with my daughter. I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this.”

  “Because you wanted to use me to save your daughter, who I’m sure would be real delighted to know about this conversation we’re having.”

  I laughed out loud. “She would kill me.” I liked him. I held out my hand. “I’m March Cantrell.”

  His grin faded and he frowned slightly, but took my hand, then slowly scanned the Cantrell logos on everything from the knit beanie on my head to the neon graphics on board I rode. I was a poster child for the company that carried our name.

  “Cantrell Sports?”

  I held up my hand. “Guilty.”

  “Your husband was Mike Cantrell,” he said flatly.

  Before I could say anything, the chair stopped with a sudden jerk and I grabbed his arm instead of the bar.

  “Whoa.”

  We hung there, slightly rocking. Lift chairs had glitches and stopped, and until they could get them running again, you were stuck there. We dangled above one of the steepest, rockiest parts of the mountain.

  I bent slightly over the side and looked at the small strip of soft snow below us and the jagged gray rocks on either side. “That’s a long way down. At least there’s no wind.”

  He started talking to me, quietly at first, easily. He raised horses, which didn’t surprise me, considering the way he spoke. I wondered if he had been on the rodeo circuit at some point, roping or riding. He was in board clothes, not jeans, but I expected off the mountain he wore boots and a belt with a buckle you couldn’t miss.

  He told me about his son, a twenty two year old musician and a guitarist, who had studied music abroad and was touring Europe with a country band. I did the math over again. He had been a young father.

  “What made him go overseas?”

  “The Royal Academy of Music. His mother is British. He calls me when he can, but . . . ” he laughed slightly, “he’s twenty two. I’m not at the top of the list. He spent summers at the ranch—I own a place outside of Sparks—but I usually have to track him down to see him for holidays.”

  “I would hate to be without my kids at Christmas,” I said. “Although this year we’re without Mike, and it isn’t the same. There’s that empty spot to remind you someone’s missing.”

  “Your husband,” he stopped for a moment as if he couldn’t find the right words. He looked at me for a long moment and then said, “There was something in the Reno paper about him passing. It was tied to an article about the boarding event last winter.”

  “It was a horrible car accident. He was in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong moment. That haunts me sometimes, you know? I wonder if only his plane had been earlier or later, or if only he’d hit a couple of red lights along the way.” I didn’t say anything more, but turned and looked at him.

  I wondered what he was thinking about because his look was distant and painful, almost grieving, as if what I said opened some old wounds for him, too.

  I studied at him, and he finally looked at me, and I thought an understanding passed between us. He got where I was coming from. I didn’t have to say anything and neither did he.

  “My son preferred his mother’s people for Christmas.” He changed the subject back on topic and shrugged. “I understood that. They’re good folks.”

  “Your ex-in-laws?”

  “I wasn’t married to his mother.”

  “Oh,” I said flatly and wanted to bite back the words. I didn’t want to sound old fashioned and judgmental and wasn’t sure how I had come across.

  “I suspect your daughter’s out of the offering now.” He laughed, clearly teasing me.

  “That depends,” I said. “On how you treat your women.”

  He said he learned that hard lesson a long time ago, and he sounded honest about it. He told me who his son’s mother was, a name instantly recognizable because she was supermodel who graced the covers of top magazines for fifteen years and was the famous face of a high end cosmetic campaign.

  “I saw her once when we were in Aspen,” I told him. “She’s lovely. Didn’t she marry some British rocker?”

  He nodded, laughing. “I have access to good concert tickets for life.”

  “Why do you not hit me as the rock concert type?”

  “You got me,” he said with that honeyed accent. “I’m a country boy all the way.”

  The chairlift was still stalled and we had been dangling there for a long time while the temperature was dropping. Ahead of us, the top of the mountain was covered in a misty white cloud, and the snow had been falling more heavily for the last few minutes. I shook some of it off me and tapped my foot against my board to knock off the accumulating snow.

  A shiver ran through me and I wrapped my arms around myself and rubbed my hands together. “I’m beginning to think those last few runs I wanted to take were not such a good idea.”

  “Are you cold?” he asked. “Here.” He wrapped his cashmere scarf around me and moved closer, his arm pulling me against his shoulder. I didn’t know whether the instant warmth I felt was from his body or from my embarrassment, but I was less cold, and my flush faded.

  He smelled like cinnamon and man. Other than Mike, I hadn’t been close enough to a man to notice a scent for longer than I could remember; it felt strange and provocative at the same time, and I was somewhat uncomfortable with my reaction.

  “Better?” he asked me, and I was again aware of the timbre and lilt of that voice, the warmth of him next to me, and the awkwardness I felt or maybe thought I should feel. I wasn’t certain how I was reacting. But I was reacting on some elemental, butterflies-in-the-stomach level.

  I looked everywhere but at him. “I wonder how long they’re going to leave us here.”

  “I read somewhere once about a ski area on the East Coast where the lift operators went home and left two people on a chair all night.”

  “Nice.” I punched his arm. “How very comforting. Luckily I know someone in operations and the ski patrol here checks every chair and gondola on this mountain before they close it down.”

  He laughed, and we sat there huddled together in silence, the snow falling now in white sheets and the mountain trail only visible for about fifty feet.

  I spotted a skier in a red patrol jacket burst out of the snow cloud and stop below us. “The lift’s broken.” He called up to us. “We’re doing evacs.” He then spoke into a radio for a minute.

  “Great,” I said looking down. “An evac. All these years riding and I’ve never been evac’ed. Lucky us, we’re at the lift’s highest point.”

  “I was evac’ed once years back. They threw a tennis ball with some twine over the cable—”

  “Twine? I don’t think so. I weigh more than that.”

  “You don’t have anything to worry about. And let me finish . . . ” he said and I could hear the smile in his voice. “They used the twine to pull a heavy duty rope over the cable with a t-bar seat attached to it. We crawled on and they lowered us down. A piece of cake.”

  My ego kicked in and I had the horrid thought that it might take a team of men to lower me down. I could hear Phillip now. Remember when they had to use half the ski patrol to lower Mom from that broken down chair lift? I’d be the butt of his joking for a good month, butt being the most telling word.

  I looked down toward the ground again.

  “Aunt March? Is that you?”

  “Jared?” Rob’s son was one of the ski patrol. He was actually my second cousin once removed, only by marriage. But family is family, and age and Cantrell custom dictated we were Uncle Mike and Aunt March since the time our kids could speak, and we had all spent so much time and endless vacations together over the years. “It’s me.”

  “Want me to radio Dad?”

  “God, no! I’m fine. Just get me out of this chair. It’s cold up here.” Within minutes the patrol was ready for me, so I kicked o
ff my board.

  “Look,” my Southern friend said to me with the easy confidence you’d expect from a cowboy. “It’s not going to be so bad.”

  Before me was a cable with a strapped seat like on a children’s swing. I lifted the bar and immediately felt his arm around me.

  “I’ve got you.” His mouth was next to my ear and his breath was warm.

  I grabbed the rope and crawled into the seat and buckled up. As they lowered me to the trail, I waved up at him and realized he had told me about his son and about some of his life, but he hadn’t told me his name.

  They lowered me down rather smoothly considering. I was very thankful for both men standing below me as I stepped on solid ground and gave Jared a hug. “Thank you. I don’t want to do that again for a while.”

  “How long were you up there?”

  I checked my watch. “Over an hour.” I watched as they sent the rope seat back up.

  “You need to sign a release,” Jared told me. “Laurie has it over there.”

  I wanted to talk to my cowboy friend, but I went over to the girl holding a clipboard, signed the release and she handed me a free pass.

  By the time I returned, he was picking up his board. I held out the pass. “We have season passes. You want this?”

  He looked at me and flicked his season pass clipped to the pocket of his jacket.

  “Maybe for a friend,” I said.

  He took it. “Thanks.”

  “Can I buy you a drink? To thank you,” I added, lamely.”

  He checked his watch and dropped his board on the snow. “I’ve got to be somewhere. New Years Eve,” he said, stepping into his bindings. “If I take you up on that drink I’m gonna be late.”

  “Okay, “I said brightly and held out my hand. “Thanks.”

  He took my hand and held it for longer than normal. “Any other time I would have taken that drink in a heartbeat,” he said and winked at me. He lowered his goggles and took off down the run.

  After a second or two I called out, “Wait!”

  He skidded to a stop at the berm of the run and looked back up at me, not lifting his goggles.

  “I don’t know your name.”

  “Rio,” he said, and waved before he took off down the run, his voice echoing back to me with that Texas lilt. “Rio Paxton.”

  I watched him disappear around a curve and just stood there frozen like an idiot, board tucked under my arm, my hand on his scarf still around my neck. Rio Paxton. No wonder he looked familiar.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Rio Paxton wrote his first number one country hit at age seventeen. At eighteen, he was performing on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. When he was twenty, the Country Music Association gave five different country star performers, duos, and groups coveted awards for recording the songs Rio Paxton wrote. Just in time to celebrate his twenty third birthday, he wrapped up an extended tour of the US and most of Europe, playing to packed venues and sell-out shows.

  Stardom reached out and locked him in vertiginous arms, and after a few more riotous years passed by in a blur, the booze, the drugs and women all caught up with him—along with a few nights in jail after public brawls and some talk of tax problems. His career was badly damaged from the influence of a trail of wanna-bes and bootlickers around him only for the prestige and free drugs, using him to create their own identities, until his reputation had crumbled into nothing but dust as fine as the dry red clay of West Texas.

  Rio Paxton had been too young to see it all coming, too green to read insincerity in the bright lights, star shine and hypnotic lures of fame, and the demands of a wolverine industry that devoured the naïve and sucked the talent from the pith of their bones, leaving behind scorched and hollow human beings.

  Before he was close to thirty, he was already washed up—a fallen star that burned out fast, barely a man—just that same thirteen year old kid from West Texas, who picked up an old guitar one lonely day and discovered he loved to sing.

  His downfall had been public enough for me to remember it even now with some sense of pity and waste, like standing there and watching a tornado rip through a town. A disaster was happening and there was nothing you could do to stop it.

  The charming innocence he had when he first hit it big disappeared painfully fast. Once his songs had crossed over into pop music and were played on all the radio stations, he won Grammys and American Music Awards along with his string of CMA awards.

  Mike and I had seen Rio perform at one of the old casinos show rooms at the peak of his popularity, and I remembered him walking on stage with a guitar strapped over his shoulder, dressed in cowboy boots and tight jeans, a simple plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black hat low over his eyes as if he had something to hide.

  But unlike so many other singers, the hat didn’t stay hiding his eyes from the audience. For the first few songs, before he was joined by his band, he sat on a wooden stool in the center of the stage, one boot heel caught on the rung and he pushed the hat back, exposed to everyone in that crowded room.

  On stage he had been a humble young man with a voice like melted butter and brown sugar, who talked to the audience between songs and could make you cry when he sang about Texas or his mother.

  But that had been a lifetime ago.

  Later that night, as I sat with my family taking up three tables in the casino lounge, waiting for the ten o’clock show, Rio Paxton and what I knew of his history was on my mind. I honestly hadn’t known he was playing at the casino tonight. The idea for us to hit a show belonged to my sons, after we all had a late dinner at Ciera, and like a lamb to slaughter I followed them to another casino, and the room behind the lounge bar, where to my surprise a big sign out front of velvet ropes showed Rio’s picture and listed the special show times for New Year’s Eve. There had been an early show, and then a three hour break, so I understood then why he’d left the mountain.

  A cocktail waitress placed our drinks in front of us just as the house lights dimmed and the stage lights grew brighter. One set of red curtains opened to reveal a single wooden stool, and he walked on stage, guitar slung on a shoulder, wearing boots and dark jeans, shirtsleeves rolled up, an older more weathered version of the man I had seen perform that night so many years back.

  Maybe it was the board clothes that made me not recognize him. No cowboy hat or jeans, but then my first thought when he spoke to me was that he should have been dressed the way he was.

  Maybe it was senility. But he sang in those rich caramel tones I remembered, a song about bright city lights and a young cowboy. That song had shot to number one, broken chart records, and made Rio Paxton a name everyone recognized.

  As he sang, his gaze scanned across the audience before he looked back down at his guitar resting on a bent knee, then hit another verse and raised his eyes to look in our direction. I knew the moment he saw me because his gaze didn’t move on. I smiled. He didn’t.

  My heart jumped to my throat. Oh . . . no . . . .what if he thought I was stalking him? I wasn’t quite old enough to be his mother, but I was an older woman who he had happen-chanced to sit with on a chair lift, a whack job who tried to set him up with her daughter and didn’t have the good sense or memory to recognize who he was.

  I felt like I was getting into a bad place mentally, so I sipped my drink and tried to listen to the music and let go of my feelings and my thoughts and concerns about how I had looked to him. He was merely someone who had been kind to me, but who I didn’t know. A sweet man. Frankly, I was really getting too old to care about what people thought of me.

  The music went on and eventually the back curtain parted and revealed his band playing along with him. Molly and Keely and Renee were clapping along to the music as the songs grew faster and more upbeat, and soon the place was rocking and I just joined in and had fun, though it took another couple of drinks to properly loosen me up.

  After a short break, the next set of songs started with ballads, and the songs built and the band roc
ked on until Rio and his guitar players were extending the songs with instrumental challenges, as he moved from rhythm guitarist, to the bass guitarist, to the drummer and to the keyboard player; one rocking song led into a well known heel-kicker about lowdown bars and wild women. The crowd went nuts when they finished and left the stage.

  Everyone was on their feet, clapping and waiting for the encore. They came back out and crowd applauded and sat down again. I noticed Rio made some kind of gesture to the band before they played the intro to his biggest hit, It Feels Like Crazy Sometimes.

  He started singing as he came down the front steps into the audience, walked in our direction before I could realize what was happening. He kicked the chair next to me around and straddled it, his arms resting on the back, holding the mike and singing to me.

  Stunned, I stared down at the dark hair on his forearms, and when I braved a look at his face, those eyes had me and I couldn’t look anywhere else as he sang:

  It feels like crazy sometimes,

  To have loved someone so long.

  You wrapped yourself around me,

  I can’t breathe now that you’re gone.

  It feels like crazy sometimes,

  This life I’m livin’ now,

  Gettin’ through this world without you,

  Some days I don’t know how.

  It feels like crazy sometimes,

  To wake up and find you missing.

  And I walk the floors and wonder,

  What other man you’re kissin’.

  It feels like crazy sometimes,

  When I think back so long ago,

  To the days before I met you

  When my heart had nothing to show.

  It feels like crazy sometimes,

  To know what my mistakes cost.

  I have no one else to blame but me,