But instead, she shrugged out of her coat, found a seat, and pitched in.
“How’s your project going?” Abby asked her sometime later.
“My project?”
Abby smiled at her grandmother. “I told you Rae moved into Hope’s house in town. She’s striking out on a brand-new path.”
Rae braced herself for Martha’s disapproval, but the older woman merely gazed at her a moment, then returned her attention to the crust she was rolling out with a quick, deft hand.
“It’s going great,” Rae said, maybe a little too intensely. She cleared her throat. “It’s fun living with Hope and her sisters. To be honest, it makes me wish that Tory and I were closer.”
Geographically and emotionally, she thought. Then bit back a smile, because her brother and sister and she had always adhered to yet another unspoken Trujillo family rule. Sometimes they had tense interactions, but only between themselves. No public theatrics—that was better left to Inez and Kathy. They mostly got along.
Though as she thought that, it occurred to Rae that if they’d been close the way Hope and her sisters were, maybe they would have worried less about theatrics and been more about the unwavering support whether they agreed with each other or not.
Something she’d never really noticed about her brother and sister because she’d always had Riley.
Ouch.
“I always wanted a sister,” Abby was saying. She smiled at Rae. “But then, I had you and Hope, so who needs sisters? And now you get to live in town. That must be fun.”
“I can walk to work.” Rae paused, a knife in one hand and an apple in the other. And decided this was as good a time as any to count her blessings. “It makes me feel more connected to things. Cold River itself, I mean. All the people who live and work there. And things are so convenient. If we run out of something while cooking, for example, I can just run down to that little market by the courthouse. You can’t do that when you live in the country.”
“You better hope you can milk it or pick it,” Martha agreed. “Or you’ll have to do without.”
Abby’s smile widened. “I’m really glad that you did this. I think it’s really good for you. And … I’m glad that something changed with you and Riley, because I don’t think it’s the healthiest thing in the world to live in a small town and pretend someone you have so much history with doesn’t exist.” She said all that in a burst and then looked apologetic. “I hope it’s okay to say that.”
“It’s more than okay,” Rae assured her. She did not think about the Harvest Gala. She certainly did not think about Riley with a date. She tried not to squirm in her chair, even though she was desperate to dislodge that heavy stone that still sat on her, and the other, sharper one sunk deep inside. Maybe that was why her voice went up a couple of octaves. “Riley and I are friends now. It’s fine. More than fine, it’s great. Fantastic, even.”
She pulled in a breath at the end of that little display and pretended she didn’t feel the weight of two sets of Douglas eyes on her. Rae focused on her apples instead.
For a while, there was nothing but the sound of the radio tuned to the oldies station Martha preferred. The older woman even hummed along when she really liked a song. And it was like a lullaby, though Rae didn’t feel sleepy. A lullaby for her heart, maybe.
She was breathing easier when it was her turn to roll out some dough. It was therapeutic, she could admit to herself. The kneading, the rolling pin. Making flour and water do her bidding.
“I remember when it occurred to me that my marriage could only be as good as I let it be,” Abby said conversationally. “I mean, when it dawned on me that if I couldn’t sit down and have a conversation about my marriage with the person I was actually married to, it wasn’t really a marriage.”
Rae rolled her eyes. “Subtle.”
Abby grinned. “I didn’t actually mean to aim that right at you. Not really. I was thinking about you and Riley figuring out a way to be friends after all this time. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? One way or another, figuring out a way to communicate. That’s any relationship.”
“I wouldn’t say Riley and I have a relationship. We have…”
She couldn’t say benefits in front of Martha. She was sick and tired of the word friendship. He was just … Riley. His sister thought she’d never loved him when she’d never loved anyone else. And all this time, she’d managed to avoid thinking too hard about all the ways she’d hurt a great many more people than simply Riley himself. She’d been focused on the fires between them they couldn’t put out, and on the way some people liked to judge her for the things they couldn’t understand. She’d felt downright pious about her refusal to defend herself, to let everybody think what they wanted.
Self-righteous but never grieving.
“History,” she managed to say, when she realized her words were hanging over the table, unfinished. “That’s what Riley and I have. A whole lot of history.”
“The point of history is to learn something, Rae,” Martha said sedately. “Otherwise, it’s a collection of things that happened, as easily forgotten as remembered.”
Rae told herself she had absolutely no idea why she felt like sobbing into her pie.
The baby monitor on the counter crackled to life. Abby cocked her head to one side, smiling faintly as the staticky sounds became a wordless song that filled the kitchen.
And Rae’s heart … ached.
“He should go back to sleep.” Abby grinned conspiratorially at Rae. “Sometimes he does this. He wakes up in the middle of his nap, sings himself a lullaby, then sleeps a bit more.” She laughed. “Mind you, other times he wakes up with a mood on and is utterly inconsolable.”
She pushed back from the table, wiping off her hands on the apron she wore tied around her waist. “I’ll just go check.”
Abby hurried out of the room. Rae stayed where she was, listening as the singing carried on, imprinting its off-key melody into all the places she ached.
“I love that you bake all these pies,” Rae told Martha after a moment. Because her heart felt swollen and song-heavy, but the kitchen smelled happy and good. And Bart singing himself lullabies was a joyful thing, no matter how complicated it made her feel. And she’d been so committed to moving on, to starting something new, that she’d forgotten that there was so much love tangled up in the roots of things too. How had she let herself forget? “I love that you bake. My grandmother can barely heat a pot of water. And my mother always says that her mother baked a lot, but she didn’t pick up the gene.”
Martha snorted. “Inez Trujillo has always been more interested in cooking up a controversy than a casserole. We all have our gifts.”
Rae almost forgot what year it was. Because it could have been any afternoon from her childhood or adolescence, sitting at this table and pretending Martha was hers instead of Abby’s.
“I think the best gift my grandmother could give anyone would be to stop fighting with my mother,” Rae said. “But then, if she did, who would my mother have to fight with? I guess some people are really comfortable with their own misery.”
Her words landed on the table before her, hard. Setting off that tuning fork inside her yet again, until she thought her bones might shake apart.
Was she talking about her mother and grandmother? Or was she talking about herself—and all these years with Riley, chasing their own tails around and around and around?
Amanda’s voice echoed in her head. I don’t think you ever loved him.
She held her breath, wondering if there was time to run out the door before Martha’s frank gaze shredded her. But the older woman merely carried on preparing her fillings, her hands far quicker and more agile than Rae’s and her eyes on what she was doing.
“I guess I really shouldn’t comment on other people’s happiness,” Rae said after a moment. She cleared her throat. “It’s not like I’m any good at it myself.”
Martha let out a hoot. “Nobody’s good at happiness, child
. It’s not a merit badge. It requires choosing. Day after day, hour after hour. It’s not where you end up that matters, it’s how you get there.”
“So far,” Rae said to her pie crust, “my journey has mostly been upsetting.”
“That’s a choice,” Martha said. Placidly. “And that’s the good news. Because if you don’t like what you have, you can choose something else.”
Rae told herself her throat hurt because it was November. If she didn’t have a cold yet, she would soon. Maybe a full-on flu. There could be no other reason at all.
“Some choices you make,” she said when her throat ached a little less and Bart wasn’t singing any longer over the intercom. “Others are made for you.”
Martha looked up then, putting down her utensils and fixing that gaze of hers on Rae. Direct and occasionally relentless, though never unkind. Rae couldn’t look away.
“I’ve known your grandmother for a long time,” Martha told her. “Your mother too. They never cared for each other back when your parents were dating, and I can’t imagine anything’s changed since. Like chalk and cheese, the two of them.”
Rae tried to smile. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“But I’ll tell you this. They both love your father. And you too, whether it feels that way to you or not.” Martha’s gaze seemed to bore deep into her, digging down into all those tangled roots Rae had been pretending weren’t there. For far too long. “Love is still love, even if it looks different than you think it should.”
Abby came back into the room, smiling widely and not carrying Bart. “He went back down. That means we should get another hour before—”
She stopped halfway into the kitchen and looked back and forth between Rae and her grandmother. “Everything all right?”
“Everything’s great,” Rae gritted out before Martha could make her cry. Openly. “I keep telling you.”
“So you do,” Abby agreed. She took her seat again. “Maybe one of these days, I’ll believe it.”
Rae ignored her, because it was that or curl up into the fetal position in the middle of the kitchen floor. Martha Douglas would disapprove of that sort of display, she knew.
Instead, she lost herself in fruit and dough and the seductive notion that if she assembled all the pieces of what she wanted in just the right way, just like a pie, she could put it all together and come up with something sweet.
No matter who judged her for it, she told herself boldly.
Even if the person she feared might judge her the most was herself.
16
“That dress is entirely too pretty to mope in,” Hope announced the night of the Harvest Gala. It was always held on the night before Thanksgiving—before folks started fattening themselves up for winter, as the head of the Heritage Society liked to say. In every speech, every year. “You have to stop.”
She was shaking her head at Rae as if Rae had tripped and ended up face-first in one of the centerpieces she’d only then finished arranging just so on all the tables in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel.
Hope’s version of helping had been to lounge at a seat at her duly reserved table, looking like a deeply bored angel in a sparkly gown that hugged her willowy body, somehow showing everything without showing a thing. A work of art, really.
Rae, meanwhile, had allowed Hope and her sisters to talk her into a fire-engine-red dress she already regretted. It was too bright. It swished and swayed while she walked, calling attention to her legs.
It felt like it ought to be worn by someone far more sophisticated and together than Rae. To say she regretted it was an understatement. Why had she imagined—for a brief, giddy moment while surrounded by the Mortimer sisters, with even Faith looking on admiringly—that she might actually want extra attention? She’d caught Douglas Fowler, the owner of the hotel, who was older than her father, looking at her when she’d walked in, to her horror.
But it was too late now. She was stuck. The lobby and graceful Old West reception areas were already filled with people, and the ballroom doors had just opened. She was a screaming red beacon to one and all, like it or not.
“The dress is the least of my concerns,” Rae told Hope loftily. And almost entirely truthfully, because she was looking around the ballroom, trying to make sure she saw any possible mistakes on any of the tables.
Because her grandmother certainly would.
“Then you need to get your priorities in order,” Hope said sternly. “Because that dress is beautiful. You are beautiful. You should take five seconds out of your life to appreciate that, and where better than the grand ballroom of the Grand Hotel?”
Rae looked around again, this time to see if any of the other volunteers or charity donors were within earshot. “None of this was necessary. I don’t know why you wouldn’t listen to me. The dresses I have—”
Hope waved a hand. “Every dress you have is fine, sure. Perfectly suitable if you happen to be, say, staff at someone else’s wedding. But this is a gala. The entire point of which is to make like Cinderella, dance until a shoe falls off, and sparkle while you do it.” She smiled. “Feel free to put that on a T-shirt.”
Rae sighed, though it was mostly for show. Hope was, after all, the person who—when Rae had asked her who she planned to take as her date to the gala—had stared straight back at her and said, my magnificent self.
That Hope was likely to have a Cinderella-worthy evening was certain. She would see to it personally. Rae, however, did not feel like Cinderella. Not Cinderella at the ball, anyway. She’d spent years coming to the Harvest Gala without a date, so there was no reason it should feel so agitating tonight. She was sitting at a table with Hope and her sisters and some other, younger shop owners, because that was their tradition—adopted right around the time Rae had stopped bringing her usual date, if she recalled correctly. The past couple of years, Matias had been here too, and as annoying as he could be and often was, he managed to pull it together in a nice suit.
Rae was all too aware that she wouldn’t have thought about a date for even a second if Riley hadn’t said he was bringing one. In years past, he’d sat at a table with his brothers and the rest of his family, brooding darkly while she pretended she didn’t see him, and life had carried right on as normal.
“Personally,” Hope said then, “I’m looking forward to see who appears on Riley’s arm.”
His name out loud was like a punch. It was why she’d banned it for so long.
Rae ordered herself to calm down. And did not, in any way, calm down. “That makes one of us.”
“I want to see who’s brazen enough to do it.” Hope rose from her seat in a sparkling, shimmering rush. “It’s big fun when you’re playing your little barroom games. Have a little dance, maybe a drink, with Riley right there looking on. Spicy. But who in Cold River is idiotic enough to actually turn up at an event like this with your husband?”
“My ex-husband,” Rae corrected automatically. Then scowled at her friend. “And it’s not a game, Hope. It’s not—”
“Don’t mind me,” Hope said, but she was smirking. “The champagne must have gone straight to my head.”
“You haven’t had any champagne.”
“Yet.”
The room started filling. For Rae, it was kind of like Halloween in reverse. She’d liked Halloween as a kid, in theory, but it was less fun out in the country than it was in town. Some years, her parents would drive the three of them in so they could march around the few neighborhoods in town with houses close enough together to lend themselves to trick-or-treating before being packed back into the car for a sugary trip home, but some years the weather was too foul to allow for that kind of thing. The gala, on the other hand, was a different kind of dress-up party. The Heritage Society liked to pack the room, and they did. People came from all over the Longhorn Valley to drink, eat dinner, and dance the night away while contributing to a cause that benefited all of them.
And they did it wearing fancy clothes that otherwise only t
urned up at the odd wedding. Or funeral, depending.
Rae’s grandmother swept in, looking as ferocious and unimpressed as she did regal. This was more or less the Inez Trujillo brand, really. She saw Rae across the room and bore down upon her, making no secret of the fact she was inspecting the centerpieces as she went.
Inspecting them and not looking pleased. Rae had the urge to hide. Maybe crawl beneath one of the tables and stay there. But instead, she remembered what Martha Douglas had said about love not looking as expected, at least not from the outside, and smiled when Inez marched up to stand beside her.
Dressed head to toe in black, as was her preference at such events.
Imagine, Rae thought, your sense of self being so precarious that you have to dress for a funeral when you knew it was a party, the better to stand out. Or punish a child for daring to repeat things you said.
The world looked a bit different, suddenly.
“You look terrific, Grandma,” Rae said.
Inez sniffed. “Parking is a disaster this year. I don’t know what they were thinking. That lobby can’t handle such a crush of people. I expected my sciatica to hobble me before I could make it through the door.”
“But you made it, anyway.” Rae did her best to sound encouraging.
Her grandmother peered down her nose, which might have been more effective if she were taller than Rae. She was not.
“Don’t patronize me, please.” Inez shifted her gaze to the table beside them and sniffed again. “Let me take a look at these arrangements.”
Rae was still standing there—waiting for Inez to finish her forensic examination of compositions Rae had stayed up for several nights in a row making come alive, then render her judgment—when her parents walked up. Her father looked the way he always did, calm and kind. Her mother, by contrast, was already showing signs of wear.
They must have carpooled into town.
“Absolutely beautiful flowers, sweetheart,” Kathy said, kissing Rae on the cheek. “People will love them and bid accordingly.”
Secret Nights with a Cowboy Page 20
