Chapter Fourteen
Magic has happened,” Abby said when Bonnie parked the van between the silver truck and the poor little faded red one.
“We do look better, don’t we? Course, now I feel guilty for spending money on my hair and nails when I could have done both myself and sent the money to Mama for the electric bill,” Bonnie said.
“Tough love, remember,” Shiloh said.
Abby pointed. “I wasn’t talkin’ about the magic of our nails and hair. Look, the yard fence is fixed and the bull is gone.”
“Poor roses still look bad. Looks like he did manage to uproot a few bushes completely,” Shiloh said.
“You any good with flowers?” Abby asked.
Shiloh nodded. “Mama says I have green thumbs.”
“Then taking care of the flowers is your job. If I breathe on a plant, it dies.”
“Silk flowers die in my care, but I can make a garden produce, so I’ll take that job,” Bonnie said. “Next week we should put the onions and potatoes in the ground.”
“Reckon Cooper has made supper to pay us back for taking care of his bull?” Shiloh changed the subject.
“I wouldn’t count on it, but I am hungry again. We forgot all about stopping for ice cream,” Abby answered. “Pop the back door so we can unload our bags. I sent a text to Rusty letting him know that we were doing the grocery shopping and I’d bring the receipt for him to repay me.”
“That was so much fun in the grocery store. Getting to buy what we wanted to cook with instead of having to make do with whatever was on sale,” Bonnie said.
“And all those lovely things we found in the mall. I can’t wait to go to church next Sunday just so I can wear that cute little dress I found,” Shiloh said.
“You’re not foolin’ me about wanting to go to church—you want to get all gussied up for Waylon Stephens. You could do worse, though. And he’s a real cowboy,” Bonnie said.
“How do you know that?”
“Woman, when you’ve been around as many cowboys as I have, you can tell the wannabes from the real ones a mile away. It’s the way they walk in boots and the way they settle their hat on their head,” Bonnie answered.
“And the way they wear their jeans,” Abby chimed in.
“You’re so right. Tight as a hide across the butt and bunched up on their boot tops,” Bonnie added.
Abby crawled out of the van. She couldn’t wait until next Saturday night so she could wear her new designer jeans and cowboy boots at the Sugar Shack. She should have bought the red boots, but the brown ones with that phoenix done in relief on the front had called out to her, and they’d been on sale, half price.
Are you going to get all gussied up and torture Cooper? The voice in her head was her mother’s. Or are you thinking about boots to keep from remembering what you said about falling in love with him?
“What are you frowning about? One minute you were all smiles and now you look like you sucked on a lemon,” Bonnie said.
“I was analyzing why I bought these boots,” Abby said.
“So you could wear them to the Sugar Shack and show Cooper that you are a sexy woman and not just GI Joe with boobs,” Shiloh said.
Abby couldn’t argue with the truth. She had been thinking that very same thing—well, maybe more about how Cooper would react to her in something other than camouflage.
“Well?” Shiloh said.
“You are right.” Neither of them needed to know that she’d also been worried all day about telling him that she could fall in love with him.
Cooper and Rusty were sitting on the sofa watching an old John Wayne Western on television. Cooper looked up and waved. Rusty didn’t even acknowledge them.
“We could use some help with the groceries,” Bonnie said.
“We did the feeding chores. You can bring in the food. What’s for supper, Abby?” Rusty asked.
“It’s Cooper’s day to cook. But I did buy corn chips, chili, and cheese so you can make chili pies. And there’s ice cream in the freezer to chase it with,” she said.
“Sounds good to me. Call us when it’s ready.” Cooper didn’t take his eyes off the television.
Bonnie pointed her finger at both of them and said, “This is Sunday. What did you tell us about the food? Get up and make your own chili pies.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened while you were gone?” Shiloh asked.
“You don’t need to explain a thing to us. We figured out exactly what happened,” Cooper said. “It was stormy and that bull of mine hates storms. I should have put him in the barn before I left. He broke through the barbed-wire fence and created a stampede. He’s got a couple of scratches on his chest to prove it, and the herd didn’t stop running until this house slowed them down. Y’all used the truck to block the fence and you are lousy at mending barbed wire. I will have to give you some lessons in that. Now will you please go on about your business and let us watch this movie?”
Bonnie’s hands popped onto her hips and she glared at both of them. “I did a damn fine job of fixing that fence. Neither of you could have done better and you are so welcome for us keeping your precious bull corralled for you.”
“It’s going to be y’all’s ranch in a few months. You just did what you should have done and you don’t get someone kissing your pretty little asses when you do that,” Rusty said. “Y’all go on and enjoy your chili pies. We grilled a steak and made us a skillet of fried potatoes. We’re good until tomorrow morning. Now move so we can watch the rest of the movie.”
Abby picked up her bags and carried them to her room. Then she went out the back door, rounded the house, and brought in the groceries. There was more than one way to teach those two cowboys a lesson.
Shiloh and Bonnie were on the way to the van to help carry groceries as she was taking in the first four bags. She smiled and said, “It’s time to kill snakes.”
“Where’s a snake?” Shiloh looked like she was about to bolt and run.
“It’s an expression Mama used—there’s more than one way to kill a snake. Y’all just play along with me. I’m about to make supper, ladies. If I remember right, those two smart-ass cowboys do like their desserts, but they told us they’re good until morning, according to Rusty.”
“How long until we eat? I didn’t have a double dinner like you two,” Bonnie said.
“About half an hour. I’ll start cookin’ if y’all put away the groceries,” Abby said.
While Bonnie and Shiloh emptied bags and filled the pantry shelves, Abby got out the biggest cast-iron skillet she could find. She set it on the stove and turned on the oven to make peach cobbler. It was a quickie recipe that called for crescent rolls out of a can, peach pie filling, and spices. Separate the crescent rolls, put a peach slice on the top, add a pat of butter, half a teaspoon of brown sugar, and a shake of cinnamon, and roll it up. Lay it in a cake pan and repeat until two cans of rolls were done. Then pour the juice from the pie filling over the top and bake until the bread was done.
While that cooked, she put a pot of rice on the back of the stove and poured olive oil into the cast-iron skillet. She diced two chicken breasts and an onion, which sizzled when they hit the grease.
She handed a wooden spoon to Shiloh. “Keep that stirred while I get the rest ready, please.”
“I love stir-fry,” Shiloh said.
The sizzling onions sent a wonderful aroma all through the house. By the time the rice was done and fluffy, the cobbler had finished. She added bell peppers and broccoli to the skillet, waited a couple of minutes until the broccoli was bright green, and tossed in chopped cabbage.
“Let the cabbage wilt just a touch and then we’ll need a few dashes of soy sauce and a lid for three minutes and we’re ready to eat,” Abby said.
“And to think I believed you when you said you couldn’t make anything but chili pies.” Bonnie stuck a finger in the edge of the cobbler and licked it. “You should have made two. I could eat every bit of this one all by myself. Shopping and being pampered is hard work.”
Cooper poked his head around the corner into the kitchen. “Hey, just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving. Got a desk full of work to do tomorrow, so I won’t be here for dinner. Is that peach cobbler over there?”
The sound of his voice sent Abby’s senses reeling and his eyes boring into hers melted her insides. Sparks flew around the room. The temperature shot up at least ten degrees. Her hands itched to touch him, even if it was just for a brief hug.
“It is, and Abby is making stir-fry. Too bad y’all are too full to even taste it,” Bonnie said.
“I’ll miss it. And I’ve got a deputy with the flu, so I’ll be in the office all day tomorrow,” Cooper said.
Now he wasn’t coming the next day for dinner, so that would be four days since they’d sat beside each other. She wanted to stomp her foot and throw a hissy like a two-year-old who didn’t get her way.
“I’m off to the bunkhouse,” Rusty yelled.
“See you tomorrow morning, unless you want to sleep in and let us take care of the feeding,” Bonnie hollered back at him.
They helped their plates right off the stove and had barely sat down at the table when Abby felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out and smiled.
“Which one is it?” Bonnie asked.
“Did we make them suffer with this food?” Shiloh asked.
“Cooper. He says I’m wicked, evil, and downright mean. That Chinese food is his favorite and he has to go all the way to Amarillo to get anything decent and that it wouldn’t be as good as what he smelled in the kitchen.”
“Success!” Bonnie threw up both hands to high-five with her sisters.
Abby studied a huge formation that looked vaguely like a chimney from the porch. It changed colors as the sun settled behind it and dusk came to the canyon. She’d tried calling Haley, but it had gone to voice mail and she’d just spent the whole day with Shiloh and Bonnie. They wouldn’t want to hear about her restlessness that night or to take a walk with her, either, but she had to do something. She couldn’t sit still and yet there was no place to go.
When she was in the army, she ran when she felt like this. And after that enormous dinner and then an equally big supper, she should either go for a run or take a long walk, but she wasn’t doing it in a skirt. She went back inside and changed into her comfortable pants and a black turtleneck, put on her heavy jacket, a stocking hat, and gloves. Before she left, she made sure her phone was tucked into the cargo pocket on the side of her leg. She eased out the front door and Martha followed her off the porch and out of the yard.
Her intentions were to walk all the way to the road, but the moonlight reflected off the granite tombstones and reached out to her, so she opened the creaky little gate and went inside. Starting at the front side were names like Hiram Malloy and his wife, Rachel, both of whom had died in 1865. She touched the stones and wondered if Hiram had been young enough to fight in the Civil War and which side he’d defended.
These were her ancestors, whether she liked it or not. Their lives had molded and made the next generation right down through time until Ezra’s day. His decision to push her and her mother away had made Abby who she was as well. Her therapist in the army had said she’d probably enlisted to prove she was as good as a son would have been. She touched the tombstone at the head of the mound of wet red dirt. “I was trying to make you understand I was as good as a son. I could and can do anything a boy can do.”
She perched on Ezra’s tombstone and tucked her hands into her pockets. Somewhere over in the vicinity of Cooper’s ranch, she could hear a lonesome old coyote howling at the sky, telling Mother Nature he was tired of winter and wanted spring to push the cold weather into the history books. The wind rattled the bare limbs of the misshapen scrub oak trees outside the cemetery fence. In a few weeks the trees would be decked out with green leaves and the ranch would take on a whole new look. She was deep in thought about Bonnie’s garden and Shiloh’s roses when she heard the rustling of dead leaves behind her.
“Coming to grips with it?” Cooper asked from the shadows of a big scrub oak tree.
She wasn’t sure what to say. There was the man whom she’d told she could fall in love with him not ten feet from her. She remembered the commitment issues she and Shiloh had talked about and it still scared the hell out of her.
“Maybe. I don’t know if I am or not. It’s easier to accept that these other people were my ancestors than to acknowledge that he was my father. And I was very drunk last night when you called.” She blurted out the last line.
“There is no doubt about that,” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
“I went for a walk,” he said. “I should keep going. See you later.”
“Enjoy your walk.” She wanted him to stay, but then she wanted him to go. That comment about falling for him was between them and she wasn’t sure how to get rid of it.
“Thanks,” he said stiffly and she heard rustling leaves as he left.
She sat down on an old wooden bench in the dark shadows of one of the big scrub oak trees on the north side of the cemetery.
“Why did you keep watch on us, Ezra, if you didn’t want to have us around?” she mumbled. “I can’t figure it out.”
She glanced at the tombstones closest to her. They were her grandparents somewhere back down the line. “Grandparents!” She slapped her knee. “That’s it.”
It had come to her in bits and pieces, but when she analyzed the whole thing, she’d figured it out. If any one of them had given birth to a son, that child would have inherited Malloy Ranch. He’d kept a watch on his three daughters to see who was the smartest, who worked the hardest, and who wound up with the best man.
The pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
If his daughters all had sons born the same month or the same year, he would have had to choose among them. What if the oldest son was a lazy shit who wouldn’t work or the youngest one got picked up for selling drugs on the street corner? Or what if one son was illegitimate and the other two had fathers but one of the fathers was a rancher and the other one was an airplane pilot?
Ezra would have chosen the best one to inherit his ranch and money through what he’d learned about his daughters. Abby thought it sad that he’d missed so much with his own daughters, only to die knowing that he didn’t have a grandson to leave his ranch to after all.
She didn’t realize how long she’d sat there until the north wind had started to blow hard enough to push its way through the bare tree limbs. She shivered and pulled her hat a little tighter. Time to head back to the house.
Leaves crunched again to signal Cooper’s approach. He sat down on the bench beside her.
“You are still here?” he asked.
“I didn’t mean to be, but I figured out something important.” She told him about the grandson idea.
“You could be right. Ezra was a cagey old fellow,” Cooper said. “Now about what you said on the phone.”
“I was drunk,” she whispered.
“I know that, so let’s delete it just like we do things on the computer,” he said.
“Is that possible once it’s been said?”
He slid over closer and put his arm around her, drawing her close to his side. “We did it with sex, didn’t we?”
She laid her head on his shoulder and it wasn’t awkward. “Okay, then, hit the ‘Delete’ button.”
“I know you aren’t growing roots, yet, Abby. But you will if you stay until spring. One day you will wake up and wonder where your wings went.”
“I’m beginning to hope you are right, Cooper, but I’m not taking that to the bank. Not yet.” She thought about leaving and suddenly there was a hole in her heart. In the next instant she let the idea of roots and staying take precedence and everything felt right in the world. But right then she was in Cooper’s arms and that could influence her decision a lot.
“You don’t have to. Just tell me when it happens.”
She nodded. “I promise.”
“That’s good enough for this day,” he said.
His black cowboy hat was pulled down low enough on his brow that she couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel him looking at her.
“Thanks, Cooper. I might not be the woman I am today if Ezra had accepted me as a daughter, so I’m trying to think about that and not hold on to the bitterness.”
Cooper squeezed her hand. “Ezra wasn’t all bad, Abby. His mother died when he was a little kid. I don’t know if it was in childbirth or if it happened when he was a toddler, but he wasn’t very old. His father raised him right here on the ranch without any women around, not even a cook or housekeeper. Your mother was the first woman in fifty years to live on this ranch.”
“How did you know all that?”
“He told me bits and pieces through the years,” Cooper answered.
“He got his comeuppance in the end, didn’t he? All that work and money he had to have paid out and still no satisfaction. Now his three daughters are living together and we really don’t hate each other, which is what he wanted us to do. I pity a man like Ezra who couldn’t move past a woman who broke his heart and love one of the three women he married.”
“Knowing Ezra, he would rather have your hate than pity.”
“It is what it is. Today it’s pity. I wonder what these other folks saw in this canyon. It doesn’t have a lot to recommend it.”
“It’s home,” he said.
“I guess it is at that.”
He tucked a fist under her chin and lowered his face to hers. Their cold lips met in a kiss right there in the cemetery under a scrub oak tree that had shaded part of the cemetery for years.
Crazy, insane thoughts chased through her mind. No one should think about fertilizer when a handsome, sexy cowboy was kissing her. But that’s exactly what came to Abby’s mind. With each kiss, each touch, and every glance, it was as if she really was putting down roots in the canyon. Perhaps that meant everything he did was like the root stimulator her mother used on the petunias in the flower boxes at the café. If so, maybe growing roots wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
Several long, lingering kisses later, he pulled away. They were both panting by now and she forgot about anything but the ache down deep that wanted so much more than kisses.
He gripped her hand in his and led her out of the cemetery. “I’m walking you home now, Abby.”
“And then I’ll drive you home,” she said.
“I can hop the fence and be there in a few minutes. Besides, as hot as I am right now, I need the cooldown time,” he said.
“I know,” she whispered.
Had she really been making out like a teenager? And in the cemetery? A slow burn started at the base of her neck and crept around to her cheeks.
Keeping her hand tight in his, he walked her right up to the door, with Martha tagging along behind them. He kissed her and whispered, “Good night, Abby. Thank you for taking care of the cattle, the bull, and the fence. And please make Chinese food on one of your days to cook this week.”
“It’s a promise,” she whispered.
He let go of her hand and she felt empty, as if someone had torn all her new little roots out of the ground. She wanted to reach out and tell him to come inside with her, even if only for a cup of coffee, so she could reclaim the feeling, but he was jogging toward the barn. She watched until he was completely out of sight before she went inside.
Martha rushed in ahead of her and curled up in front of the fireplace with Vivien and Polly.
“Where have you been?” Bonnie looked up from the sofa.
“The cemetery.”
Shiloh picked up the remote and put the television on mute. “Was that Cooper on the porch with you?”
Abby dragged one of the wooden rocking chairs across the floor so it was close enough she could prop her boots on the coffee table and then sat down. But she was far too antsy to prop her feet. She set the chair into motion with her foot. The constant movement rested her frazzled nerves a little bit. “It was Cooper, and I figured out something about those boxes under our beds while I was at the cemetery.”
“I’d rather hear about Cooper and if he kisses good. Cemeteries give me the creeps,” Bonnie said.
“What’d you figure out?” Shiloh asked.
Abby told them her theory about why Ezra had kept such close tabs on them.
“Wow!” Shiloh whispered.
“The old shit! If it had been me who’d had a son, he wouldn’t have even looked at my boy,” Bonnie said.
“What makes you think that?” Abby asked.
“Because he would have liked me the least.”
Shiloh shook her head. “I don’t think so. He would have been proud of you, Bonnie. You know more about ranchin’ than either of us and he would have respected that.”
“And you are a lady, so he would have liked you,” Abby told Shiloh.
“And you are so smart, Shiloh.”
“But you, Abby, you are the one who showed him that a woman can be anything she wants, including a soldier. No, Bonnie, I think in his own way, he was probably proud of all of us. Not that he would ever admit it,” Shiloh said.
“Maybe so, but it’s damn sad that he gave up knowing us and waited for a grandson that never came along,” Abby said.