Vickie gaped at her. April waved at the bartender and yelled, “Sparky, bring us each another round! The lady has drained her well dry! Harley’s paying!” She made eye contact with Vickie again. “Anyway, after I got counseling, I wished sometimes that I could tell you Slade had never screwed around on you. And maybe I would have if anyone could have found you. Not even your mama would tell me where you went, and I finally figured that if Slade couldn’t find you, nobody could.”
“My return address was on every envelope, April. You could have found me.”
Sparky arrived with their drinks. Vickie’s hands were still shaking, and Sparky no sooner set down the glass than she grabbed it and took a couple more slugs.
“Easy, honey. That’ll knock you flat on your ass.”
Vickie took a deep breath and was grateful for the sudden infusion of heat that flowed from her belly to warm her whole body. She took another gulp. When the alcohol finally started to make her feel calmer, she sighed and set the glass on the table. Better now. She was no longer shaking so hard that she might tumble off the barstool.
“Anyhow, now that I’ve got that puked up, can we finish our drinks and try to let bygones be bygones?”
“Bygones? If you read my letters to Slade, April, you knew that I was pregnant with his baby. I wrote to him in desperation, hoping against hope that he’d help me out somehow. Do you have any inkling how much heartache and suffering you caused?”
“Like I said, I’m truly sorry. That’s all I came to say. Harley doesn’t know about this, and I’m counting on you to keep it under your hat. I don’t want thirty-eight years of marriage to get flushed down the john over some foolish prank I played on you over forty years ago. I hope you can accept my apology and we can both get on with our lives.”
“I haven’t had a life, April, and neither has my son. Slade’s son. I just want to clarify something before you leave to get on with your life. Did you open the fourth letter?”
“Oh, yeah. That’d be the one with a picture of the baby in it. Right? Cute little guy. He sure looked a lot like his daddy.”
Vickie picked up her drink and downed the rest of it. In some distant part of her mind, she realized that she’d had too much when liquor dribbled down her chin, and she bypassed the napkins to wipe her face with her arm. “April, your lies deprived my son of ever knowing his daddy. Your lies deprived him of his father’s support, and he went without so many things because I couldn’t afford to buy them for him. Right now, he’s injured and he can’t work, and unless he can earn an income soon, he’ll end up going bankrupt. He’s got one son in college, and two more close to being that age, so your prank and the damage it caused has trickled clear down to the next generation. Those boys may not get college educations because of what you did.”
April sighed and shrugged. “Hey. You’re not the only woman who ever got herself knocked up and ended up paying the price.”
Vickie stood up on her barstool, her fists knotted on the tabletop like hardballs. “How could you look at the picture of that precious baby boy and not do something to make sure it got into Slade’s hands? You could have put the letter and picture into a fresh envelope and dropped it into the Wilders’ roadside mailbox if nothing else. Nobody would have known who put it there! And Slade would have known where to find his child!”
“Vickie, I get that you blame me for a lot of stuff, and like I said, he was a cute little guy, but he wasn’t my kid. If anybody at that house had seen my car pull to a stop on the road, I could have lost my job and faced criminal charges. Do you honestly think anybody would put her ass on the line like that for some kid that didn’t mean diddly-squat to her? You made your choices way back then. You could have taken Slade’s word about what happened, but you didn’t.”
“Because you described his birthmark to me. I knew for you to have seen it, he had to have been bare-ass naked!”
April slapped the table and laughed. “Oh, shit! I’d forgotten all about that. I did see him naked, only I was watching all the guys skinny-dip through Daddy’s binoculars. He forgot them in the pickup, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. You know?” She shook her head. “God, I had more balls than my brother did.” She laughed again. “If you’ve got Slade nibbling at your bait again, sweetie, give the line a hard jerk and hook him on the lip. That boy had a build on him like a wet dream, and he had more hanging than any other guy there.”
* * *
• • •
Slade glanced at his watch, decided that he’d given April enough time to spill her guts, and stepped out of the bathroom. He couldn’t wait to talk to Vickie now that she’d gotten the true story straight from the horse’s mouth. As the door swung shut behind him, Slade shifted his gaze to the table where he’d seated Vickie. He was just in time to see her standing up on her barstool with both doubled fists planted on the table. Then April laughed and said something more, and the next thing Slade saw was a blur of red hair, a green top, and blue denim as Vickie launched herself across the table at April.
Oh, shit. Slade lurched into a run. He heard somebody yell, “Catfight! Catfight!” And then he heard wolf whistles and hands clapping in a steady beat. When he reached the spot where he’d last seen Vickie, she wasn’t there. He turned, frantically searching for another flash of green, and saw her rolling across the floor with her legs locked around April’s waist. Oh, shit. This was bad. Really bad. Vickie was going to get her ass kicked. He ran toward the women just as April grabbed Vickie by her hair and twisted her head at such a sharp angle that Slade was afraid it would snap her neck.
“Okay,” he yelled. “Break it up! Come on, ladies. Time to let the tempers cool down.”
That normally worked with men unless they intended to kill each other. But these two females didn’t seem to even hear him. He made a grab for April’s arm. And just as he almost caught her wrist, which was attached to the hand that was about to break Vickie’s slender neck, a huge, beefy paw clamped over his arm. Slade looked up. And then he lifted his gaze higher. Harley Jones loomed over him like a giant out of a children’s storybook. The man didn’t look quite so large from a distance. But he was built like a refrigerator, only taller.
“Don’t you go layin’ a hand on my wife!” he roared.
“I wasn’t going to hurt her, Harley! I was just going to break it up.”
“Ain’t no need!” Harley bellowed. “Your woman started it! My April can take care of herself.”
“Look, you stupid son of a bitch, it isn’t about who’s going to win! She’s about to break my woman’s neck!”
Harley’s grip tightened on Slade’s arm with such crushing force that Slade feared he’d break his radius and ulna bones both at once. The man’s chest swelled, and his broad face turned scarlet. “Ain’t nobody calls Harley stupid!”
And the next thing Slade knew, he was flying backward through a plate-glass window. Stunned almost senseless, it took him a few seconds to realize where he was. As he gingerly sat up, he remembered that shards of glass lay everywhere beneath him. He was going to take his time standing up, but through the now pane-free window, he heard a man yell. “She’s gonna kill her. The cops better get here quick!”
Vickie. Slade forgot about the danger of cutting himself up and sprang to his feet. He hit the push-through front doors of the bar at a dead run, spilled inside at such a speed that he couldn’t stop, and slid into the bar. He whirled, searching the space for the woman he loved. But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He panned the interior of the establishment again more slowly and finally spotted a splotch of green through a gap between the shoulders of two men.
Slade ran in that direction. To save her. Even if he had to face off with Harley again, he had to protect Vickie. Both men and women had formed a circle around the combatants. Slade tried to push and shove his way through the spectators, but the circle around the fighting females was two bodies deep. One man ye
lled, “Look at that woman go! Knockout!” Someone else yelled, “Nope. She’s gettin’ back up! Hit her again, honey! Hit her again!”
Slade finally gained the inner circle so he could clearly see the two women. He expected it to be Vickie on the floor, but it was April on her hands and knees, struggling to stand back up. Vickie bounced around her like a boxer, both her small fists doubled. Blood trickled from April’s nose. Her bottom lip was split. And to Slade’s horror, he saw a bald spot on the side of her head where Vickie had ripped strands of hair out by the roots.
April seemed unable to regain her feet. Slade was about to yell to Vickie that the other woman had had enough, but without any prompting from him, Vickie suddenly stopped circling and pumping her fists. For a second she stood there, gazing down at April. And then she stepped toward the other woman with her right hand outstretched.
“Let me help you,” she said to April.
Slade had seen this trick before, and he yelled, “No, Vickie! Let someone else help her up!”
But he was too late. Vickie clasped April’s hand, and the instant April got a firm grip, she jerked Vickie off her feet. Vickie landed on her back. April scrambled forward and sprawled on top of her, landing so hard on Vickie’s torso that Slade almost felt the breath-expelling jolt in his own chest.
“Unfair!” Slade yelled.
And the onlookers took up the word as a chant. “Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”
Just as Slade surged forward to get the blonde off Vickie, some other woman burst through the crowd. She was a short, stout woman in baggy jeans and a gray T-shirt. She dived at April, plowing into her broadside with one shoulder. April went rolling, and the stout woman sprang after her, her arms flailing like windmill blades. Just then Slade heard a roar and saw Harley lumbering forward to rescue his wife. Good, Slade thought as he ran to collect Vickie and get her the hell out of there. Only things didn’t play out as Slade expected. Harley grabbed the stout woman and flung her away from April with one mighty sweep of his arm.
Slade wasn’t sure exactly what happened next, except that some man took exception to the stout woman being thrown aside, and he raced over to accost Harley. A rumble of rage came up from Harley’s chest and he swung the other man from his back like he was a baby ape clinging to its mother. Before Slade could reach Vickie, some other man leaped into the fray. Almost as if some invisible hand had flipped a switch, people all around Slade were swinging at each other.
Slade had witnessed his share of barroom brawls during his misspent youth when he’d been grieving for his loss of Vickie, but he’d never in his life seen a building full of people go so nuts. It was like a contagion swept through, affecting everyone it touched. His original intention had been to pick Vickie up and carry her out of there, but two men had started swinging barstools. He grabbed Vickie’s arms, hunched forward to shield her upper body as much as he could, and dragged her toward a sturdy-looking table, minus all its chairs, which he suspected were being used as weapons. He stuffed Vickie under the table and crawled under there with her. To hell with these fools and their mindless fighting.
Finally Slade heard sirens. He’d never been so glad in his life to know the cops were coming. Other patrons of the bar didn’t seem to share that sentiment. They vacated the building so fast someone might have yelled “Fire!” Some of them leaped out the broken front window. Others went out through the kitchen to the rear exit. Before Slade knew it, Harley and April were the only two people, besides him and Vickie, who remained inside the building. Even Sparky, the bartender, had vanished.
Vickie gave him a bleary-eyed study for a moment once the commotion had ceased, as if she didn’t recognize him, and then she smiled despite the pain it must have caused her with that badly split lip.
“Why are we under a table?” she asked.
“I put you under here to keep you safe, and you looked so damned comfortable, I decided to hide with you.”
She giggled. “You don’t have a cowardly bone in your whole body.”
He narrowed an eye at her. “Put another snake in my bed, and I’ll prove you wrong on that count.”
She giggled again. Then she heard the police sirens and that seemed to strike her as being even funnier. “Are we going to get arrested?”
Slade considered the question. “Probably,” he finally replied. “Vickie, are you drunk?”
She pinched her forefinger and thumb together, swayed sideways as she lifted her arm, and said, “Maybe just an itty-bitty bit.”
Slade couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing. Then he shot out an arm to keep her from toppling over just an itty-bitty bit. “I sure was proud of you when you offered April a hand up. You fought fair and square.”
She shrugged. “Not the whole time. I think she really hated it when I jammed my pinkie up her nostril.” She grinned again. “I don’t care. I got even with her for all of us. For what she did to you. For what she did to me. But most of all, I made her pay for what she did to Brody. I’ll never regret a single second. That woman will never forget the name Wilder.”
Concern welled within Slade. “Honey, did you get hit on the head?”
“No. Why?”
“Because your last name is Brown.”
She bent forward to smooth his hair. “Brown is such a common name. I like Wilder a heck of a lot better. It’s got some pizzazz.”
Slade tried to tamp down the surge of hope that filled his chest. “Yeah, well, I hate to bring up the m word, but that’s what would have to happen for you to take my last name.”
“Well, of course that’s what’ll have to happen.” She reached down and playfully grabbed his cheek to give it a light shake. “My Slade, true blue, and you never lied to me. I think I’m falling in love with you all over again.”
“I thought you never stopped.”
“I didn’t. But I’m starting over fresh. When we ride back up the mountain, let’s stop at our pine tree. I wanna whip you at chin-ups. I’ll go first, and you have to beat me, or I’ll call you a loser for the rest of your life.”
“If you stick around for the rest of my life, I really don’t care what you call me.”
“That’s good, because I want to call you my husband. We have to get married, Slade. Otherwise April wins.”
“Well, we can’t let that happen,” he said.
And despite her split lip, Slade kissed her with all the passion he felt for her. Right there in a destroyed bar, with deputies swarming through the front doors like a country-bumpkin SWAT team, he claimed her mouth, dove deep to find the never-forgotten taste of her again, and then drew up for air when he heard a very familiar voice start to read him his rights.
“Erin, is that you?”
“Yes, and this is likely my last act as a law enforcement officer. As soon as I can figure out what I want to be when I finally grow up, I’m turning in my badge. I can’t be a deputy with an uncle who has a criminal record.”
Epilogue
Nothing outshines a central Oregon day in the late spring. As Vickie gazed up at the powder blue sky, laced with the filigree of pine boughs, limned in golden sunshine, she refused to close her eyes in gratitude. Instead she gazed out the partially opened window at the beautiful wilderness and breathed in the air perfumed with all the scents of home. This was where she belonged. She’d left for a long while, but she’d been born here and she hoped, if she was lucky, she would die here, if possible at home on the Wilder Ranch in Slade Wilder’s arms. No, that can’t happen, she reconsidered. I need to outlast Slade by at least one day. Otherwise the silly man will try to drown his sorrow in booze, women, and rodeo. And that will happen over my dead body.
She jumped with a start when a voice resounded behind her, one that had been imprinted forever on her mind and heart from the time she was six years old.
“What are you thinking about?”
Vickie smiled and turne
d to gaze up at her cowboy. Other women had coveted him, and for a time, through no fault of hers or his, as she now knew, they’d lost each other. But life had a funny way of setting everything right in the end, if only two hearts could withstand the storms. They’d mourned for each other and moved through the days living a kind of half-life, merely existing because they’d been separated. Now, in the autumn of their lives, they would finish what remained of their journey together, facing whatever came. Vickie knew she would never stop feeling grateful for this second chance that they’d been granted, to enjoy the last few chapters of their lives, side by side.
“Slade Wilder, how many times have I told you that it’s generally women who ask that question?”
He bent to press his sun-burnished forehead against hers and grasped each of her hands in his. “I’m letting my feminine side come out,” he said. “I want to know what the other half of my heart is thinking.”
She’d always loved his big, firm hands. Warm, strong, and yet undeniably gentle. “I was thinking that we made it,” she said, hearing the tremor that weakened her voice, not with sorrow but with joy. “I was thinking that I’m almost glad now that things happened the way they did.” She looked up into his gray eyes, which she’d become lost in on her first day of school nearly sixty years ago. “I was thinking that if we hadn’t had April to interfere, we’d have been married forever by now, and that today, such a beautiful day, might not mean as much to me as it does now.”
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