My Hero

by Mary McBride

  His veal was overcooked, its texture reminding Ruth of the thin sole of a bedroom slipper. His pasta was at least two minutes past al dente—even Dooley agreed that the linguine was pretty near mushy—and his salad of field greens, roasted beets, and walnuts was overwhelmed by the Feta. Upon leaving the restaurant, Ruth had felt quietly smug, as well as newly inspired to open her own place.

  Corpus was now on her list of possible sites not only because of the dearth of fine restaurants, but because she and Dooley had so enjoyed the view of the Gulf through their wide balcony door. That view had been inspirational, too. She couldn't even remember the last time they'd made love twice—in moonshine and then again at sunrise.

  Still, it was good to be back at the ranch. She always liked coming home. Not that she ever went away all that much. As she stepped down from the pickup, she could hear the phone ringing inside the house.

  “Let it ring,” Dooley said, catching her in his rangey arms as she came around the front of the truck. He nuzzled his soft mustache into her neck while his hand slipped beneath her shirt. “Let's go back, Ruthie. Right now. This minute. Let's jump in the truck and drive back to that motel room.”

  “Dooley Reese!” She laughed, and briefly considered her husband's proposition before she frowned and said, “Let go now. I've got to answer the phone.”

  “Cal's home.” He angled his head toward the Thunderbird parked just in front of their truck. “Let him get it.”

  “You know he won't.”

  “Then let the damned thing ring.”

  “I can't do that.” She pushed gently out of his embrace, and then began tucking in her shirt as she headed around toward the rear of the house and the kitchen door. Her herb garden hadn't suffered in her absence, she was happy to see. She'd forgotten to ask Cal to water it, but he wouldn't have remembered anyway.

  Her kitchen always made her smile when she first entered, whether it was first thing in the morning or arriving back home after being away, even for an hour or two. She grabbed the phone on what must have been its twentieth ring.

  “Mrs. Reese? This is Chuck Bingham of Bingham Properties.”

  “Oh! Good morning, Mr. Bingham. Or I guess I should say good afternoon. Were you able to get by the ranch yesterday?” Damn. She wished she'd had a chance to talk to Cal about the man's visit. She felt at a distinct disadvantage, not knowing who the prospective buyer was or how he'd reacted to the ranch yesterday.

  “Yes, we did. And I think I have some very good news for you,” the realtor said.

  Ruth's heart felt like a fist surging up in her throat. Was this it? Was she finally going to have the money to finance her dream? She could hardly breathe. “Well, that's wonderful,” she said, trying not to sound too eager.

  “My client's interested in the entire fifteen hundred acres . ..”

  Damn. Her calculator was on the desk in the living room, and she wasn't on the portable phone.

  “…and he's willing to go as high as two hundred thirty-three dollars per acre.”

  Ruth blinked. Two hundred thirty-three? She didn't need a damn calculator to confirm that it was less than half the six-hundred-dollar-per-acre figure she had in mind. She swallowed the anger and disappointment that were rising in her, told herself this was business and that the man was simply opening negotiations. She needed to be cool and clearheaded.

  “I'm willing to listen to a higher bid, Mr. Bingham,” she said, pleased with her tone. Friendly but forceful. A steel door, but one that was still open.

  “That's as high as he's willing to go,” Bingham said. “In all honesty, Mrs. Reese, I think it's a very generous offer in light of the problems at Rancho Allegro.”

  “What problems?”

  “Well, you know.” He laughed nervously. The man sounded like a jackass. “That business with the titanium. You know. The dead goats. All that.”

  “The titanium.” Ruth's voice was flat now and sour as curdled milk. Her foot began to tap on the floor. “Dead goats. You must've talked to my brother yesterday.”

  Across the kitchen Dooley walked in the door, all smiles, while the realtor was replying, “Your brother? No. No, I don't believe I did. I spoke with a Mr. Bascom, one of your neighbors, and his wife. They stopped to chat while we were looking at the northern acreage of the ranch. Oh, and by the way, Mrs. Reese, I wonder if you have Mr. Bascom's phone number. My client wanted to make him an offer on his Thun-derbird.”

  Ruth slammed the phone down so hard she nearly broke it.

  “What's going on, honey?” Dooley asked.

  “Calvin Griffin!” she screamed. “If your gun is in your room, you better hide it from me.”

  Cal glanced at the maple dresser, where his holstered semi-automatic was stashed with his socks and underwear, and then with his head still braced against the back of the sofabed, he closed his eyes. He'd been anticipating some sort of explosion ever since he heard the truck roll into the driveway just as the phone began to ring. He had answered it himself an hour earlier, just in case Ruth and Dooley had a problem on the road and needed his help, and he'd politely informed good old Chuck Bingham that he had the wrong number. The realtor, obviously unconvinced, had been phoning every ten minutes since. Such aggressive phoning could only mean one thing, Cal decided. Titanium and dead goats to the contrary, Chuck wanted to make a deal.

  God help him. He didn't want to trample Ruthie's dreams, but he just wasn't ready to sell his half of the ranch. It wasn't out of any particular loyalty to family history, or because he didn't have anything else, any place else in the world to call his own. It was mostly because he simply didn't trust himself to make irrevocable decisions right now. He'd been thinking about that ever since leaving Holly's room this morning.

  Why taking the producer to a roadhouse tonight struck him as an irrevocable decision, he wasn't sure. Coward that he was, he'd called Holly half an hour ago to cancel their date, but nobody answered the phone at Ellie's. Now he was wishing he'd jumped in the car and driven into town to tell her personally. Then he wouldn't have to face the furious woman who was just now stomping into his room.

  “You did it again, didn't you?” his sister screeched. “I can't believe it. You did it again.”

  “Hey, Sis. How was Corpus Christi?” he asked, hoping to re-channel her anger so they didn't have to have the sell-the-ranch discussion right now.

  “Don't you ‘hey, Sis’ me, Calvin Griffin, after you promised Dooley you'd behave and then gave the real estate man some cock and bull story about plutonium and dead animals.”

  “Titanium,” he said, suppressing a grin.

  Ruth threw up her hands. “I don't care if it was uranium or arsenic in the well water. You flat-out lied to the man and I'm so damn mad I can't see straight.”

  “Well, Ruthie darlin'.” He laughed softly, sadly. “I can't think straight so I guess that makes us quite a pair.”

  Cal could see the blue flames in her eyes lower to a simmer. The anger was still there, but her expression softened. So did her voice. “I just wish…oh, I don't know. I'm not trying to sell the ranch out from under you, Cal.”

  “Then don't,” he said. “Give me a little more time to get myself together, and then we'll work something out.”

  “I'm forty-two years old,” she said, shaking her head, bearing an almost eerie resemblance to their mother all of a sudden. “I don't have that kind of time anymore. This restaurant is important to me. It's all I want.”

  “I know that, Ruthie.”

  “And yet you're doing everything in your power to prevent it,” she said. “That's just not fair.”

  “Did Bingham make you an offer?”

  “It was insulting,” she said. “A joke, thanks to you and your silver tongue.” Her eyes narrowed. “He said you were with your wife. Did you bring a woman back here yesterday?”

  Ah. She had reverted to Sergeant Ruth of the Sex Police. This facet of his sister was far easier to deal with than Ruthie the Restaurant Dreamer. “Two women,” he
said. “Twins. We did unspeakable things in every room but the kitchen.”

  Luckily she didn't have anything in her hand to throw at him. Just a searing blue glare. “I'll bet it was that woman from New York. That producer person. And I'll bet you let her snoop all over the house.”

  “Actually she only snooped in here, through my boxes.” He gestured to the stack beside her. “We were looking for my high school yearbook.”

  “Well, it's not in those boxes. I can tell you that right now.” Ruth sniffed. “It's on the bookshelf in the living room, right next to mine, right where it's always been. Mama kept them side by side.”

  The phone rang again, and Ruth gave a little start. “I hope it's not that idiot calling to insult me with another low offer,” she said, cocking her head toward the hallway as the ringing stopped. “Dooley must've answered it.”

  They both listened to Dooley's soft drawl as it drifted down the hall. It was a short conversation, comprised mostly of yeps and nopes and a final okey-doke before he hung up.

  “I'll bet it's Bingham wanting to come back and look at the place again,” Ruth said, her voice rising with hope. “And if that's the case, Cal, I want you to tell him you were just pulling his leg yesterday with all that nonsense. You hear me?”

  Before Cal could answer, Dooley appeared in the doorway.

  “Who was that on the phone?” Ruth asked.

  “It was for Cal.”

  Her mouth curved down in disappointment. “Well, he was right here, Dooley,” she snapped. “Why didn't you…?”

  “She didn't want to talk to him.”

  “She?” Cal asked, sitting up.

  “It was that little New York gal,” Dooley said. “She said she's sorry but she won't be able to see you tonight.”

  Cal shook his head. “Okay. Thanks, Dooley.”

  So much for irrevocable decisions. But now that he didn't have to make one, it was somehow all he wanted to do.

  Why the hell was she breaking their date?

  Chapter Eleven

  Holly switched off her phone. There. That was that. She'd broken her date, and now she could concentrate fully on her story. And she would—just as soon as she stopped feeling lower than the belly of a worm for leaving the message with Cal's brother-in-law instead of speaking with Cal, himself.

  She shouldn't have agreed to go out with him tonight in the first place. She wasn't here to have fun, for heaven's sake. Who did she think she was kidding with that “One date and then I'll never think about him again” business? She certainly wasn't here to date the subject of her documentary. There was probably something starred and highlighted and double-underlined in one of her old journalism textbooks about this exact ethical dilemma. She would check that out when she got home.

  That was the good news, of course. That she was headed back to New York. The bad news was that it was so soon.

  On Thursday.

  Oh, God. There was still so much she had to do.

  “Holly? You up there?” Ellie called from the bottom of the stairs. “Yoo-hoo.”

  Holly slid off the bed and went to the door of the bedroom. “I'm here, Ellie. Just doing a little work.” Emphasis on little, she thought with some disgust.

  “Well, come on down here,” her hostess' voice boomed. “I've got a surprise for you.”

  Uh-oh. If the surprise had the world's most beautiful blue eyes, she wasn't going to be very pleasantly surprised. As far as she knew, though, ol' Blue Eyes was still back at the ranch, where Dooley Reese was probably relaying her cancellation right about now. “Okay,” she answered. “Be right there.”

  On the off chance that it was Cal, Holly checked the mirror before she left the room. She almost wished she hadn't when her hair turned out to be beyond redemption.

  Much to her relief, it wasn't Cal standing at the bottom of the stairs, but rather Ellie and three women—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. With Ellie's gray hair, the women looked almost as if they were posed for a Clairol ad. She recognized the brunette as the busy beautician and former friend of Cal, Nita Mendes. Holly paused on the staircase, not knowing quite what to make of the little group. Were they a welcoming committee or a mini-mob, ready to ride her out of town on a rail? Should she smile or scream? Walk toward them or run for her life in the opposite direction?

  “Holly Hicks,” Ellie said, “I want you to meet Carol Dug-gan, Jen Eversole, and Nita Mendes. We all got to talking after church about you and your program, so I said why didn't these gals come back here for some iced tea and cookies and a little talk about you-know-who.”

  Holly knew who, indeed. “Oh. This is wonderful! Let me just run back up to my room and get my tape recorder.”

  Out on Ellie's patio, it didn't take long for the women to warm up to their topic, and after ten or fifteen minutes, nobody was even glancing at Holly's little black tape recorder where it sat between the sugar bowl and the big glass jar of sun tea. They seemed to have forgotten that they were speaking on the record. Or else they no longer cared as one story about Cal instantly sparked memories of another. And another. Holly had already decided the VIP Channel had erred by featuring him on Hero Week. To hear these women talk, Calvin Griffin was far better suited for Heartthrob Week.

  Carol, the blonde, hadn't spoken much at all, but now she laughed as she spooned sugar into her second tall glass of iced tea. “All right, well, shit, since everybody's 'fessing up here, I guess I'm gonna have to admit that in our junior year I had a not-so-accidental flat tire out at Rancho Allegro.”

  “Now how'd you manage that?” Ellie asked while Jen and Nita exchanged knowing looks.

  Carol blinked innocently, then replied, “With a steak knife. What I hadn't counted on, though, was that it would be Dooley Reese instead of Cal coming to my rescue. Damn the luck. He'd gone off to Padre Island or someplace for the weekend. It must've been about a hundred and ten that afternoon, but Dooley was so sweet when he changed my tire. Poor thing kept apologizing for not being Cal.”

  “He and Ruth were probably still newlyweds then,” Jen, the redhead, said. “I hardly remember ever being so young.”

  “And foolish,” Carol said.

  Jen nodded. “On the other hand, I do remember I used to turn down dates with other guys in the hope that Cal would call and ask me out.” She took a thoughtful sip of her tea before adding, “And I sat home plenty of Friday and Saturday nights, too, when he didn't.”

  “For Lord's sake, girl. Why didn't you just call him?” Ellie exclaimed. “I don't understand it. Or was I the only one in our class who subscribed to Ms. magazine back then?”

  “Yes,” all three women answered in perfect unison, after which all four of the former classmates dissolved in laughter.

  It was like a class reunion, Holly thought, this unexpected get-together out on Ellie's flagstone patio, sipping from tumblers of iced tea in the deep shade of ancient oaks, the hems of the women's Sunday summer dresses rippling with an occasional breeze while they fanned themselves with little paper napkins that Ellie had brought out with a tray of ginger cookies. It was like a time-out from present-day demands and problems, an opportunity to reminisce, to linger awhile in lost times.

  Holly was loving every minute of it. She'd never been to a class reunion herself. She wondered if she'd feel quite this comfortable, sitting on a patio in Sandy Springs with her own classmates, and she tried to imagine having anything in common with Lynda Bryan or Deb Sims or Bethany Watts. Of course, they wouldn't be discussing Cal Griffin, would they? Nor would Holly be hanging on their every word and gesture, telling herself her interest was strictly professional.

  “Well, I guess we were all pretty smitten with Cal, if that's the right word,” Jen said with a sigh. At thirty-nine, she was the oldest of the group, as well as a three-time grandmother already, a status that Holly found almost staggering considering that the woman was only eight years older than she.

  Nita, who still looked about twenty and had the longest fingernails that Holly had ever se
en, laughed. “Smitten's good. It sounds a lot better than saying we all had the hots for him.”

  “And guess who wound up with him most of senior year?” Carol said, grinning. “Nita, you slut.”

  The beautician's glossy lips curved in an inscrutable smile and her dark eyes gleamed, leading Holly to believe Nita was probably savoring a few memories—maybe the drive-in movie scenario—that she wasn't entirely willing to share.

  “You did sleep with him!” Jen squealed. The young grandmother sounded like a teenager, and her charm bracelet, bedecked with the birthstones of children and grandchildren, went wild as she clapped her hands. “I knew it. Didn't I tell you, Carol? I just knew it. Nobody ever looks that happy in high school unless…”

  Ellie, far more matronly than her classmates and the self-appointed mistress of ceremonies this afternoon, cleared her throat. “More cookies, y'all?” she asked, running interference with her silver tray. “I'm not sure this is exactly what Holly came all the way from New York City to hear. Are your ears just about melting, honey?”

  “No,” Holly said, taking a gingersnap from the tray. “I'm really enjoying this. Honest. Tell me more.”

  “Yeah, Nita.” Carol winked over the rim of her glass. “Tell us all more.”

  “Well, that's the funny thing.” The expression on Nita's face changed dramatically from decadent to wistful, from secretly sensuous to visibly sad. She almost looked like a different person, older, much older, and not necessarily wiser.

  “We never did,” she said, all of the earlier good cheer gone from her voice. “Oh, I know what everybody thought, and I didn't even mind that people sort of assumed that Cal and I were sleeping together. I thought I was pretty hot stuff back then, you know?”