Chapter Nine
A coconut crème cake chilled in the refrigerator along with a banana pudding. Abby would have made tiramisu, but she’d forgotten to put ladyfingers on her list when Rusty went to the store. If someone didn’t like coconut or bananas, then they could have ice cream for dessert. The lasagna was ready to pop into the oven and homemade Italian bread was rising on the back of the stove with a towel over it. Salad makings were ready to toss together at the last minute.
She shouldn’t have made a big deal about not knowing how to make anything but chili pie, but dammit, she hadn’t planned on cooking for a family when she left Galveston. It felt as if she was losing control, being told to cook two days a week and to clean while she had the half day off from the ranch work to boot. And Abby did not like the feeling that loss of control brought into her heart and soul.
With the last load of laundry in the washer, she was ready to tackle the bathroom. It didn’t look too messy at first glance, but neither had the communal ladies’ room in the barracks in basic.
“So you belong to me on Wednesdays.” Abby carried a bucket of cleaning supplies into the bathroom. “And I bet you’ve never been military clean in your life. Looks can be deceiving—if my old sarge put on the white glove, you’d find out you were filthy.”
Starting at the far side with the toilet itself, she scrubbed the whole thing until it shone. She frowned at the apparatus holding the seat and lid onto the potty. She could see bits of mold down in the crevices and could hear the drill sergeant yelling at her as she stuck her white-gloved pinky finger into a valley just like that.
She needed an old toothbrush to get that area really clean, and she found one in the medicine cabinet above the sink, along with a dozen half-full bottles of prescription medicines, all with Ezra Malloy’s name on them. She carried Ezra’s toothbrush back to the potty and cleaned out those pesky little grooves.
“I can hear you doing flips in your grave, Ezra.” She laughed. “Well, this is just a little bit of the punishment you deserve for your sins.”
She checked the clock when she finished and smiled. It was exactly eleven thirty—time to remove the lasagna from the oven and set it on the table and put the Italian bread in the oven to bake. Mama always said that good lasagna had to blend flavors for thirty minutes after it was cooked, and Mama had been a fabulous cook.
Fifteen minutes later the salad was tossed in a chilled bowl. The whole house smelled like baking bread and the table was set.
The phone rang. She located it by following the sound into her bedroom and there it was, an old black rotary shoved under the edge of her bed. Thank God that thing had never rung before or she’d have gone into instant cardiac arrest. She sat down on the floor and answered it cautiously.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Abby, this is Cooper.” As if she needed him to tell her his name. “I didn’t want to ask in front of the whole family, but could I please have your cell phone number? You have mine and I figured yours would be in my phone in the recent calls area, but it has disappeared. I’d like to call you sometime,” he said.
The phone smelled like cigarette smoke and there was a dirty ashtray under the bed, along with several cardboard boxes. Why hadn’t she noticed those boxes before now?
Because you haven’t vacuumed your room or dropped anything close to the bed that you’d have to pick up, that sassy voice in her head said.
“You still there, Abby?” Cooper asked.
“I’m sorry. Yes, I’m here.” She rattled off the number.
“Thank you. Are you talkin’ on the phone in Ezra’s old bedroom?”
“I found it under the bed.”
“I shoved it up under there when we took out the hospital bed. He kept the phone on the bed with him until he died. There is also a phone outlet in the living room if you want to move it in there. And you might want to know that he did not have a long-distance plan,” Cooper said. “I’m leaving the office now. Be there at noon for my chili pie and ice cream.”
She left the three boxes alone, but carried the ashtray and the phone with her to the living room. It wasn’t hard to find the outlet for the phone because there was a light spot on the wooden table beside the rocking chair that testified the phone had sat right there for many years. The ashtray went into the trash can—butts, ashes, and all.
At five after twelve, Bonnie came through the back door into the utility room right off the kitchen with her nose in the air. “That is not chili. I was dreading coming home for dinner because the smell of that stuff gives me the dry heaves worse than drinkin’ too much.”
“Why?”
“Mama likes chili and Mama likes to drink. The morning after isn’t too pleasant,” Bonnie said.
A cold blast of air preceded Cooper from living room to kitchen. “That’s Italian. I know oregano and basil when I smell it.”
“And fresh-baked garlic bread,” Rusty said.
Shiloh pushed Abby out of the way so she could wash her hands at the kitchen sink. “You lied. You can make more than chili pie.”
“Disappointed?” Abby asked.
“I’ll wash up in the bathroom since no one is using it today,” Cooper said.
Abby’s heart did a flip when she realized that he hadn’t gone to the kitchen sink to wash his hands with Shiloh.
Shiloh shook her head. “I’m not a bit disappointed to have Italian for dinner today. I can get a chili pie at a fast food place or make it in five minutes anytime I want it.”
“You can pop frozen lasagna in the oven anytime, too,” Abby said.
“Darlin’, Mama’s people are Italian. You can’t fool me. That’s the good stuff, and that bread is not store-bought either.”
“So that’s where you got the black hair,” Abby said.
“Yes, it is and half of my temper.” She smiled.
“I haven’t seen much of that yet.”
Cooper returned from the bathroom. “Can I help put anything on the table?”
“We’ve got it, Cooper. And Abby, you haven’t pushed me into a corner. If you ever do, you might get a taste of that temper,” Shiloh answered.
After the funeral, they’d sat down randomly, but now they had their appointed places around the table—Rusty on one end, Shiloh on the other. Bonnie across from Cooper and Abby.
Why does she get to sit at the head of the table? I’m the oldest, Abby wondered as she settled in next to Cooper, the sparks flitting around the room like butterflies in the spring.
“You are left-handed,” she spit out without thinking.
“Been that way my whole life,” Shiloh said. “That is why I always sit where my elbows don’t create a problem for the person sitting next to me.”
“So was Ezra. Guess that’s another thing you inherited from him. This is amazing, Abby. If Ezra had realized that hiring three women would make meals appear on the table like this, he might have parted with a few dollars to run the place,” Rusty said.
“Damn fine food. Olive Garden can’t hold a candle to this,” Cooper said. “You can make this anytime you want, Abby. Oh, before I forget. The poker game is off for this weekend, Rusty. I’ve got to transport a prisoner down to San Antonio. Want to do a ride along to keep me company?”
“Stayin’ the night?” Rusty asked.
Cooper nodded. “Leavin’ at six o’clock Saturday morning. We need to get him to the station there by five o’clock and processed in. Then we’ll stay the night and come back Sunday. We’ll be home by bedtime.”
“You women able to run this place for the weekend without me?” Rusty said.
“I reckon we can feed cows and gather eggs without you lookin’ over our shoulders,” Bonnie answered.
“Think you could get those two pastures plowed on Saturday without tearing up the tractors?” Rusty looked down the table at Shiloh and Abby.
“If we do tear up a tractor, I’ll get out my toolboxes and have it all fixed by the time you bring your drunk ass home,” Bonnie told him.
“Oh, yeah?” Cooper raised a dark eyebrow.
“Saturday is my day to cook, but we can always eat leftovers if Bonnie needs me to help her fix a tractor. Which reminds me, you will owe us big-time for not being here to cook dinner or take us out on Sunday, but I’m sure you will make it up to us the next week, right?” Abby said.
“Sure, I will.” Cooper smiled.
“Then I vote that Sunday after church we go to Amarillo for shopping. We will have our paychecks before you leave, right?” Shiloh asked Rusty.
“Cash or check?” he asked.
“Cash,” they all three said in unison.
“Pass the bread and salad. What kind of dressing is this anyway?” Cooper said.
“Homemade Italian,” Shiloh answered for Abby. “And a good cook never gives away her secrets. This has a touch of something I don’t recognize, but it’s awesome.”
Cooper bumped his shoulder against Abby’s. “It’s not bad for chili pie.”
She bumped him back, not a bit surprised what it created. “Some days I get it right. Some days, the pigs wouldn’t touch it.”
His hand on her knee said that he didn’t believe a word she’d said.
The boxes under her bed nagged at her all afternoon as she cleaned out the barn, sweeping each stall and putting down fresh hay in case it was needed for calving season, which Rusty said would start any day. She hoped to hell Bonnie knew something about being a cow’s midwife in an emergency.
She leaned the rake against the gate and sat down on a bale of hay to catch her breath. Why hadn’t Rusty taken those boxes out of the room? He’d removed everything else but one ashtray and the telephone. The bed had even been stripped down, and there were no towels in her tiny little half bath. He had been thoughtful and left a couple of dozen hangers in the closet, and the place did smell like it had been sprayed down with a mixture of disinfectant spray and that stuff that takes away odors.
Switching thought tracks from her bedroom and the boxes back to the barn, she picked up the hoe and rake and carried them back to the tack room. Sucking in deep lungfuls of barn scents, she instinctively reached for a piece of hard candy. It was a trick she’d learned in the war zones, and it came in handy with her snack habit. If she was eating something, then her sense of smell wasn’t so acute. But her pocket was empty and it was all Cooper’s fault.
If he hadn’t set her hormones into overdrive, she would have remembered to make a side trip back to the bedroom for her normal pocketful of anxiety prevention after dinner.
Think of the devil, and the cell phone will ring.
She fished it out of her pocket and hit the “Talk” button. “You are in trouble.”
“What’d I do?” he chuckled.
“It’s your fault I didn’t put candy in my pocket and this barn smells like cows and rat piss,” she said.
“What’s candy got to do with that and how is it my fault?”
“We were talking about Italian food and I forgot to get my candy. Candy dulls the smell,” she said.
“It does not. That’s a psychological trick that they tell you over there to keep you from puking when you smell bombs and dead bodies.”
“You are full of shit,” she said.
“Not me, darlin’. I was in the National Guard for ten years and they pulled our unit for a nine-month tour in Iraq five years ago. I was not impressed enough with my extended vacation in the sand and sun to want to reenlist. But if you’d been there to cook lasagna for me, I might have.”
“Five years ago I was in Afghanistan. Are you flirting with me? I thought we were just friends,” she said.
“If I’d have known you were that close, I would have popped over for a beer.” He laughed. “I called to fuss at you for lying about not being able to cook. And what would you do if I was flirting?”
“I’d tell you that you were making a big mistake,” she said.
“Why? Flirting isn’t falling into bed with each other again.”
“Because it could lead to that, and you have roots and I have wings. I’m not sure they work too well together,” she said.
“Maybe you could put down roots.”
“Maybe you could grow wings.”
“I’ll never leave this ranch,” he said.
“And I don’t know if I’ll stay on this one.”
A long pause preceded his next statement. “The canyon has a way of getting into folks’ blood. Loretta could tell you all about that. Once you’ve been here for a while and then leave, it haunts you and beckons you to come back home.”
“Only if you left something behind,” she said. “Loretta left Jackson behind and that’s what haunted her.”
“Be careful, Abby. It can sneak up on you. Want to go to the Sugar Shack with me some weekend for a beer?”
“Maybe. If you don’t find a little brown-eyed doll in San Antonio this weekend who takes your eye. If you get a new girlfriend, she might not understand your friendship with the neighbor,” she said.
“Jealous?”
“Not even a little bit!” she lied.
“I’m hurt,” he chuckled. “I just knew you’d be all jealous and that would give me my ego trip for the whole day.”
She crossed her fingers behind her back. “To be jealous would mean I am more than a friend.”
Cooper’s chuckle turned into laughter. “Now I’m really hurt. I might even be bleeding from a cutting remark like that.”
“I’ve got another stall to clean and I’m sure you’ve got a county to save from drug dealers, cattle rustlers, and outlaws. See you tomorrow at noon. It’s Bonnie’s turn to cook and she might be making Italian too,” Abby said.
“I’m not complainin’ one bit. See you then.”
Holy shit! She’d just agreed to go on a date with him. Her hands actually trembled at the thought of dancing with him.
You are going to the local bar for drinks. You’d go with Haley and not think a thing about it, so why not with Cooper?
Because, she argued with her conscience, I’m not attracted to Haley and I am to Cooper. I’m going, but . . .
She stopped and thought about all the thousand buts she should consider before she opened that can of worms.
Number one, the biggest but in any equation, was never start something that couldn’t be finished. It showed poor judgment. It didn’t matter how his touch made her feel—nothing could last between them. Her fault, not his. She had a deep fear that she’d be like Ezra when it came to a permanent commitment and parenthood and another fear that she’d demonstrated exactly the latter when she blew up that building with the little girl inside. Cooper deserved better than that.
But number two stated that it was better to nip something in the bud. If she stayed in the canyon, Cooper was and would always be her neighbor.
“But the flirting and the bantering is so much fun,” she whispered. “I like him. I really do. He’s a decent man.”
She finished the last stall seconds before she heard two tractors and a truck pulling up outside the barn. Rusty’s glasses fogged over when he left the cold and came into the tack room.
“Time to call it a day,” he said.
Without the glasses, his eyes weren’t nearly as big and there was a softer look about his face. His lips weren’t as firm and hard looking, yet his chin was stronger. Standing with his feet apart, his jeans tight, his boots scuffed from work, wearing his standard mustard-colored work coat, he’d make any woman take a second look. Yet not one single spark flickered between them. She felt like she was looking at a cousin.
“What?” he said as he put his glasses back on.
“Nothing. When do we get to see the bunkhouse?”
“Anytime you want to after you’ve been here a year and run me off the ranch,” he said. “Until then, by the will Ezra left behind, it belongs to me. I will tell you that it’s small and only houses six men at the most. Oh, and when it’s my time to host poker, we play down there.”
“Rusty, I don’t think any of us will be firing you. As far as I’m concerned, you’ll have a job on the ranch as long as you want it,” Abby said.
“Thank you. We’ll have to see how long I want it. Now, let’s call it quittin’ time. Even old slave driver Ezra knew a body needed rest after long days of hard work.” Rusty smiled.
She stopped long enough to make a ham sandwich out of yesterday’s leftovers, put it and a handful of chips on one plate, and use a second one for a huge slab of coconut crème cake. With a can of beer under her arm, she made her way to her bedroom with barely a nod at Shiloh, whose head was thrown back on the sofa, or Bonnie, who’d let all three dogs into the house to lie on the rug in front of a cold fireplace. When she started down the hallway, Martha got up and meandered toward the bedroom with her.
“Let me grab a shower first,” Bonnie groaned. “No, I’m having a bath—a long one to get the aches out of my poor body.”
“I’ll go second. I’m halfway into a romance book I want to finish tonight,” Shiloh said.
“See y’all in the morning.” Abby carried her food to her room.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, her food spread out around her. Martha plopped down beside her and she fed her bits of cake, sandwich, and even chips. Bonnie hadn’t said that anything but chicken bones would hurt the dog, and the old girl seemed to really like cake.
She could see the corner of one of the boxes. They probably contained exactly what was advertised on the end: three sets of Corelle dishes in that old modernistic gold pattern that was popular when the dishes first came out. There were even a few of them left in the mismatched set of plates in the cabinet. But right there in bold Sharpie letters on the end of each box were her initials—AJM—and she wanted to know why. How in the world had he even known her name? Her mother had said that he hadn’t wanted to see her or to know what she’d been named.
She pulled all three boxes out to find numbers on the tops. One, two, and three—evidently she should start with one, since Ezra had made it easy. It had to be his handwriting, but the perfect numbers and letters had an almost feminine slant to them.
“So he was a perfectionist?” she said.
Pushing her half-eaten sandwich to the side, she decided she would give the rest to Martha. She upended the beer, taking several long gulps.
“Maybe I need some of his white lightning before I open the boxes,” she mumbled as she pulled number one closer.
The tape was yellowed and peeling on the first box. The second one had started to turn colors, but it was still stuck down fairly well. The third one looked fairly recent.
“So he closed them up and never looked back?” She frowned.
She slipped a fingernail under the tape on the first one. It tore lengthwise, leaving some of it stuck firmly. After three tries, she pulled a knife from her pocket, flipped it open, and slit the tape.
“Files?” The frown deepened as she pulled them out. All neatly kept in manila file folders with years printed on the outside in the same slanted hand.
She started with the first one, dated 1984. It held her mother and Ezra’s original marriage license and a copy of her birth certificate. She’d weighed seven pounds and seven ounces, had come into the world at twenty inches long on November 16, 1984, at seven thirty a.m. There was a picture of her in the hospital nursery that had begun to fade and one of her in a bassinet on a sun porch.
“Mama, he threw us out. Paid you to leave and promise you’d never come back to the canyon and you sent him pictures of me? What was wrong with you?” Her voice caught in her throat and it took the rest of the beer to swallow down the lump.
There was one folder for each of her first ten years in the box with the number one on the top. Each one held newspaper clippings, report cards, and awards that she’d gotten at school. It ended with a picture of her building a sand castle on the beach with her mother.
Box number two covered her life for the next ten years. It wasn’t until she got to the end and found the copy of her mother’s obituary in the local newspaper that reality dawned.
“Mama didn’t do this. We were stalked.” Goose bumps the size of the canyon wall raised up on her neck and arms. “But why? He didn’t want me because I was a girl, so why would he even care what I did?”
The third box covered from ages twenty-one to thirty, ending with her separation papers. Lord, the man had copies of every commendation and promotion she’d gotten. The only thing missing were actual pictures of her in Afghanistan and Kuwait. Evidently it had cost far too much to hire an investigator to go that far.
It was all surreal, sitting there looking at her life. “But he only knew what I did and what I looked like; he didn’t know who I was. Mama knew the important things.”
She returned the smoky-smelling folders to their proper boxes and shoved them back under the bed, unwound her legs from sitting cross-legged and went straight to the closet for a bag of miniature candy bars. It might take every one of them to get her through the next hour until bedtime and then she wasn’t sure she would be able to sleep.
Her phone rang and she dropped the candy like she’d been caught stealing money from a bank vault.
“Hello,” she answered cautiously.
“Abby, are you okay? Your voice sounds strange.”
“Hello. Did you know about the boxes under the bed?” she asked abruptly.
“No, was I supposed to? Is this some sort of a horror movie?” Cooper asked.
“Did you know that Ezra stalked me my whole life and that he kept files on everything I ever did?”
“No, I had no idea.”
“Well, he did.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know. I’m in shock and I don’t understand why he’d do that if he didn’t want me.”
“Meet me in the hay barn. I can hop the fence and get there faster than if I drive over,” he said.
She started to say something, but the television noise behind him had stopped. When she looked at the phone, she realized he had ended the call. She picked up the disposable plates and headed toward the kitchen, glad to see that both Shiloh and Bonnie were in their rooms.
With one leg propped backward against the wide barn door, he looked more like one of those old Marlboro men than a sheriff. He dropped his boot to the ground and opened his arms. She walked right into them.
He drew her close and she could hear the steady beat of his heart thumping in there against his broad chest. “My God, Abby, you are trembling.”
She’d had those symptoms before, on her first deployment. It had happened when she and another vehicle were on their way to check out some intelligence. By a strange twist of fate, she’d been in the second sand-colored patrol car. The first one hit a bomb and went straight up into the air. Her driver stopped and backed up as fast as he could. Then bodies came floating down from the sky.
She’d made it back to base before she went into shock, but she recognized the symptoms very well.
“I feel violated,” she said.
“Why?”
“He didn’t want to know me, but he sent someone to spy on me. It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“Crazy? That was Ezra. He was a controlling old fart. He might not have wanted you on the ranch to undermine a son he might have later, but you were his as much as this ranch was,” Cooper said.
“I was just a pile of hay or dirt or a cow?”
He kissed the top of her head. “Darlin’, I can’t explain Ezra or his crazy notions. He was old-school, back when old school was the only school, if you know what I mean. His ideas went back to the time that Texas was settled. I liked him. He was honest, opinionated, and funny. But that doesn’t mean I agreed with him. We had some damn good arguments.”
“About round bales of hay?” she asked.
“Among a whole raft of more serious issues, believe me.” His arms steadied her nerves as he tipped her chin up with his fist and his lips settled on hers like they belonged there. It wasn’t one of those steamy kisses full of passion and heat but it calmed her, grounded her in reality. Then he drew her closer to his chest and wrapped his arms around her and she felt protected from everything. Not even the boxes under the bed mattered anymore.
“I’m not sure that was a wise idea,” she said.
“What? The kiss?” She nodded. “Maybe not, but it happened,” he said. “Let’s take a drive. Have you been to Silverton?”
“Just through it on my way to the funeral, and I was running late.”
“Then let’s go get a soft drink at the convenience store and I’ll show you the courthouse and the police station and the diner. It’s a nice little Texas town.”
It wasn’t a date. It was two friends going for a cola or maybe a beer. She could damn sure use one more that night and Cooper would be driving.
Cooper had lived next door to Ezra, gone to church with him, talked to him over the fence, but he hadn’t actually known the man. When it came to Ezra, no one really knew what made him tick or think the way he did. So there was no way he could help Abby understand the man who’d fathered her.
If Abby had grown up on the ranch next door, he might have fallen for her when they were teenagers. But she hadn’t and like she said, she had wings. That meant she could fly away at any moment. He liked her, liked her spunk and her determination to learn the business, but . . .
And therein was the problem—a woman who hated the ground she walked on would never be happy for a whole lifetime in the canyon, and he’d never be happy with a lifetime out of the canyon. He wished things could be different, that she’d stand still long enough to grow roots, but that hateful voice that argued with him said that wasn’t likely to happen.
“It’ll be pretty in the spring when the wild daisies are in bloom,” he said.
“That’s what I hear. According to the marriage license, Ezra married Mama about this time of year. Now I wish I’d asked more questions about why she was even in Texas.”
“Why don’t you ask your living relatives in Galveston?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Don’t have any. Mama was adopted at birth by an older couple who died before I was born. Mama didn’t marry until she was past thirty and then she married Ezra, who was even older.”
His truck drove on, coming out of the canyon north of Silverton. Land reached out to touch a sky full of twinkling stars with a big round moon taking center stage. “Ezra said once that he met his first wife at a wedding, the second one at a church picnic, and the third one was a waitress in a truck stop between Claude and Amarillo. Does that help?” Cooper asked as he drove down Silverton’s wide Main Street.
Abby slapped her knee. “Georgia!”
“This doesn’t look a thing like Georgia,” Cooper said.
“No, Georgia was Mama’s best friend when she was a kid. She had a picture of Georgia on the bookcase in the living room. It was taken on Georgia’s wedding day and Mama was in the wedding party. She told me about the wedding in the little white church that was in the background and how beautiful it had been with all the poinsettias and Christmas decorations. That must have been where she met Ezra, but that means they got married a month later. Holy shit!”
“Georgia who?” Cooper asked.
“Mama never told me her last name. She married a soldier and after the wedding they went to England. Their friendship had faded with the distance. I found Mama crying one day and she said Georgia had died,” Abby said.
Cooper laid a hand on her shoulder without a word. She reached up and squeezed it and then her hand went back to her lap. He moved his to the steering wheel and turned into a parking spot beside the courthouse.
“This is where my day job is located,” he said.
“That’s one big courthouse for such a little town.”
“It takes care of the whole spread-out county. Want something to drink now?”
“I thought I wanted a beer when we left home, but I’ve changed my mind. What I really want is a pint of ice cream—rocky road or praline—if there’s a place still open. I’d even share it.”
“Happy to.” He grinned. A rooster crowed, cutting off further comment about her ice cream habits, and she cocked her head to one side.
“That’s Rusty’s ringtone,” he said. “I’ll only be a minute . . . Hello, don’t tell me you are backing out of our trip.”
“No, this is a business call. Abby never came back from her walk. Her truck is here, and her sisters are on the verge of hysteria. Would you come over here and help us locate her?”
“She’s right here in the truck with me. We drove up to Silverton for ice cream,” Cooper said.
“I’m not hysterical,” Shiloh said in the background.
“Here.” Cooper handed the phone to Abby.
“Hello,” she said cautiously.
“Give me that phone,” Shiloh said.
“Oh, shit!” Abby whispered.
“Abby Malloy, we were worried about you,” she said.
Cooper could hear every high-pitched word coming through the phone. Shiloh was not a happy woman right then and Abby would have some explaining to do.
“I’m a big girl. I can leave the house without telling either one of you,” she protested. “Don’t wait up for me. And don’t bother to lock the back door. I could open that thing in ten seconds with nothing but a hairpin.”
She hit the “End” button and handed the phone back to Cooper. “Maybe you’d better make it two pints of ice cream.”