Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (23 page)

“Coweta’s mare…yes, sir, your mama used to win on this one a lot. I was pullin’ for you last night, and you two did well,” he said. His tone was not critical of her, but it was as if nothing would equal her mother.

“I doubt I can do as well as my mother, but I try,” she said.

“You do fine. Just need more experience, is all, and you got the mare here to help you.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She was preoccupied with trying to figure a way to ask if he was her father. She watched him stroke Lulu’s neck and tell her that she was a good old gal.

“Yep,” he said. “Coweta knew how to train a barrel horse.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Well, it was good to have seen you, gal. Good luck to you.”

“Thank you. Nice to have met you, too.”

He nodded, his eyes all squinted up, and walked with his stiff gait, out of the barn into the bright sunlight. She watched him and saw Harry, a drink cup in each hand, stop and speak to him, although she could not hear their words.

Then she quickly returned her attention to bathing Lulu, knowing she had let her chance slip by, and glad and sad about it at the same time.

“I will be ready in an hour,” she told Harry at her motel room door. “It would only take me thirty minutes, but I just have to wash my hair.”

She paused with her hand on the doorknob, her attention lingering on him for a precious minute while the evening sun slanted on him. By unspoken agreement, they had both made certain their time at the motel was limited. It seemed a good idea. They entered their rooms and slammed the doors in unison.

Undressing quickly, she threw her jeans on the floor for the puppy, who curled up immediately on them, and went to the shower. Her mind insisted on lingering on Harry and warm sensuous fantasies, but she thought that if she hurried, she could outrun the foolish urges. She also reminded herself how much
more appealing she would be after a shower. While bathing and grooming Lulu, she had managed to get herself very damp and dirty, and surely she smelled of horse.

As she scrubbed her hair and her skin, she kept pushing thoughts of going to bed with Harry that night out of her mind. She had decided she absolutely should not have sex with Harry, and she was firm in her reasoning, which was that she only had so much of herself left after Robert and Monte, and she needed to take care of that self carefully. She refused to be some sort of weekend stand, no matter if she was falling in love with Harry.

Still, every once in a while her resolve on this matter faltered, the way any woman’s would, and she would have to think it through all over again. She wondered what she would do if Harry made any attempt to seduce her. She was just a little annoyed that he had showed little inclination to do so when they came to the motel.

When she turned off the water, she heard the phone ringing. It had stopped by the time she got her hair wrapped in a towel, which she immediately ripped off, as she thought perhaps it had been Harry calling and listened to hear him knock at her door. She wrapped a towel around her body and shook her hair to let it fall in its normal curls.

But no knock sounded at the door. She checked the phone, and there was no message light, either, which puzzled her. Just as she reached to lift the receiver to call Harry’s room, the phone rang again. That startled her, and she jumped.

“Rainey. Thank God you answered,” Charlene said, when Rainey at last did pick up the receiver. “The guy at the desk said you were in, so he tried again….”

Recognizing the crisis tone in her sister’s voice, Rainey fairly screamed into the phone: “What’s wrong?”

“Daddy has had a heart attack, and is in the hospital.”

Rainey’s first coherent thought was that she was awfully glad she’d had a shower. Having a shower meant she was prepared for action. The first action she took was to run out her door and over to Harry’s, wearing nothing but her towel, and pound on his door. It never occurred to her to use the phone.

Homeward Bound

A
fter bursting out with, “My father’s had a heart attack,” she erupted into sobs.

Harry took her in his arms, and she cried against him. Against his chest, which she finally realized was bare and was being smeared with her tears. He was wearing his denim shirt, but it was unbuttoned and hanging open. Taking hold of each side, she pressed the fabric over her eyes.

She knew she had to get a hold of herself. On some level she was shocked at herself for standing there in a towel and crying hysterically. She had often gotten overwhelmed, but she was not normally a person to get overwrought. She had not cried like this when her mother died, not out of control, which this felt to be. Quite suddenly she found herself in the midst of saying, “Oh, God, please,” and unable to get enough air.

Harry set her on the bed and produced a paper bag. “Breathe into this bag…here…breathe. Thatta girl.”

She thought she did breathe into the bag. She must have, because
she smelled donut. She really wasn’t certain of anything, however, until she found she was staring into Harry’s brown eyes.

“Better now?” he asked, gently pushing her hair from her face in the way he would a little girl’s.

She nodded, struggling with the inclination to be totally a little girl and curl into his arms. She feared that another emotional bomb might explode in her any second, and she didn’t know what she might do.

He sat beside her and pulled her against his chest. “I’m sorry, honey. Losing your mother, and now your dad…I’m so sorry.”

It came to her in that hugging and rocking that Harry thought her father had died.

“Daddy isn’t dead,” she said. This jolt was what she needed; she came upright and took a good breath. “He’s in the hospital, and I have to go home right away.”

She sprang to her feet, sensible instinct compelling her to grab her towel, which had started to slip. “I have to get the trailer and Lulu and go home. Can you check us out?” Barely recording his okay, she raced back to her room.

In ten minutes she had dressed and was throwing things into her bags. Snatching up her cosmetics, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and paused. She heard Mama: “In a crisis, you find strength in two things, good manners and presentable appearance.”

Immediately she took her brush to her hair and fastened it at the back of her neck, put on her silver feather earrings and applied color to her lips, then stuffed the lipstick in her jeans pocket. She would not face her father without her earrings and lipstick.

Harry came out from his room at the same time she did and took her bags from her hands. She stood there and watched him fling them over into the back of the pickup, for the first time realizing she had assumed he was going along.

He opened the passenger door and called the puppy, putting him in the seat. “Ready?” he asked, looking at her. “I’ll drive you.”

She shut the door behind her and slipped into the seat of the truck. Harry slammed the door and checked to make certain it was caught. She watched him round the hood and slip behind the wheel. She thought that she needed to ask if she was to drop him at the airport, but she didn’t. She had a big lump in her throat and was afraid she would start crying again. She was not at all herself. Herself seemed to have deserted her.

“What’s going on? Are you leavin’?” Leanne asked.

Leanne came running beside Rainey as she hurried Lulu to the trailer that Harry was hooking up. Rainey told her about her father having had a heart attack and then remembered to add that he was in the hospital, not wanting Leanne to think, as Harry had, that her daddy had died.

“Oh, my gosh. How bad is it?”

“I don’t really know. Charlene said he’s awake and aware, but they have him in intensive care. They think he had an attack early this morning, but no one found him until almost noon. He was sittin’ at the table by then, slumped over, sayin’ he had indigestion real bad. He could have had several small attacks.” As she said this, she imagined, horribly, his heart in shreds.

Jerking her mind from the thought, she handed Lulu’s lead to Leanne so she could open the trailer door.

Leanne said, “I know this is distressing, Rainey, but your daddy is at the hospital. They’re takin’ care of him, and there isn’t anything you can do. There’s no need for you to give up your ride tonight. You stand to do really good and make some money. Why don’t you stay and run? You can leave right afterward and be home by one, two at the latest.”

“Oh, Leanne, my father has had a heart attack. What do I care about runnin’ barrels?”

She took the lead rope from her cousin’s hands and led Lulu into the trailer. Roscoe was at the mare’s heels, giving small yips, trying to be of help. He had never done that before, but she imagined he sensed her urgency and wanted to help. Lulu did not care about urgency when she went in a trailer; she was smart enough to be careful with the placement of her first step.

“Roscoe, no!” Rainey said, worried that Lulu would get aggravated and kick him.

Lulu heaved her body into the trailer, and Rainey removed her lead and fastened the rail that held her in the middle. When she stepped out, Leanne closed the door for her. Rainey immediately walked around looking at all the trailer tires, then checked the hookup to the truck. Harry was inexperienced in connecting, but even if he had been experienced, she would have checked. Her mind was clicking rather frantically with the necessary steps for safe travel. She even checked to make certain Lulu was still on her feet. She was afraid in her distracted emotional state that she would forget something important and maybe the trailer would come unhooked, or they would run over the puppy, or something horrible like that. In fact, her mind seemed to be filling with dire thoughts faster than she could empty it. She looked around to see if any horses were tied to either of the nearby trailers, afraid that somehow they might manage to run over one, or cause it to bolt and choke itself.

“You need any cash?” Leanne asked, momentarily distracting Rainey from her worrisome thoughts. Leanne was sort of following her around.

“No…I’m okay.”

She didn’t see the puppy, she realized with alarm.

“Where’s Roscoe?” she cried and bent to look under the truck and trailer.

“He’s right here, Rainey. I have him,” Harry called to her, popping up from the other side of the truck, where he’d apparently been bent over with the puppy. He set Roscoe in the back of the truck and proceeded to fasten him there with a rope from either side.

She got in the passenger seat, and Leanne came to her window and thrust a card at her.

“You call me,” she said, and Rainey saw her reflection in Leanne’s sunglasses and realized she had not seen her eyes. “Soon as you know somethin’ about your daddy, call me at this number and leave a message.”

“I will, soon as I get a chance,” Rainey said, and a minute later they started off.

She glanced into the side-view mirror and saw Leanne looking after them and thought about her suggestion that Rainey stay and make the run. She thought then that Leanne might have needed her to stay, and she felt a little guilty at leaving her cousin. She felt as if she needed to split herself in two.

Then she looked over at Harry.

“Harry.”

His eyebrow went up, and he pressed the brake. “Forget something?”

“I can drop you at the airport,” she said, making herself say it. “You don’t need to be goin’ with me…you have your own life to see to.”

He looked stubborn. “I’m driving you. You don’t need to be going all that way by yourself, not like this.”

She did not argue, as selfish as that was. She was simply too relieved. She did not feel up to driving. And she wanted Harry with her, could not bear the thought of being without him.

She looked out the windshield, in the direction of home, her mind’s eye going past the city streets and buildings and down the highway through the grassland and rimrock.

As he drove out of the fairgrounds, Harry cut too soon and bumped the trailer tires over the curb.

“I’ll do okay on the highway,” he said immediately.

She was not critical, didn’t say anything. There was no way she could drive. She was again blinking back tears and throwing her heart down the road to home.

“I hope Daddy doesn’t die before I get there,” she said, her lips trembling. “I have so much to tell him. I don’t want him to die before I do.”

Even though she neglected to direct Harry and he ended up taking Interstate 40 over to Oklahoma instead of heading southeast right away, they made it in under four hours, with only two stops, three if you counted the time she had Harry pull over on that long stretch of back road down west Oklahoma so that she could relieve herself. There just wasn’t any place to stop out there for about a hundred miles, even in the daytime.

Before they put Amarillo behind them, Harry had stopped at a Texaco Star Mart. Impatient with the stop, Rainey stayed in the truck while Harry topped off the fuel tanks and went inside. When he came out, he handed her a sack of snacks.

“I can’t eat anything,” she said, shaking her head and setting the sack aside.

He took the sack and pulled out a container of milk and then several packets of pills, which he opened and held out in his palm.

“What are those?” She stared at the pills in his hand, wondering if he had managed to buy drugs, if maybe drugs were being sold now in convenience stores and she hadn’t known about the new practice.

“Calcium, vitamin D, magnesium,” he said and thrust them at her. “Drink the milk and take these. It’ll calm you.”

By the way he was looking at her, she wondered how she appeared. Apparently in need of calming.

She took the pills and drank most of the milk. When she opened the glove box to get a napkin to wipe her mouth and apply fresh lipstick, Mama’s Bible popped out at her. She opened it and attempted to read a couple of places in the Psalms that Mama had marked with snips of paper, but the rocking of the truck made the print jump and caused a nauseous feeling. She set the book on the seat rather than put it in the glove box, though.

Mama, can you do anything?
She wondered if Mama could talk to God and persuade Him to let Daddy live. She wondered if she was being punished, but she knew this was silly thinking on her part, the weird thoughts one has when one is under strain. God wasn’t about to end her father’s life simply because she had neglected him. She did keep thinking a whole lot of ‘if onlys’…if only she had said things, said she loved him, asked the questions she needed to ask, been more open. If only she had been home.

“If I had been home, I would have found Daddy earlier,” she told Harry and went on to relate how she had “known” her mother was in distress and gone running to find her beneath the apple trees. Although she admitted that maybe she wouldn’t have known, since she did not carry Daddy’s blood in her veins.

“But I would have been by earlier to see him. I work most Saturday mornings, and I almost always stop by to check on him on my way to work. I should have been there.”

“
Should
is the wrong word,” Harry said. “You can use
could
but not
should
. Why should you have been there? You are a grown woman with a life to lead. You could have been there,
but you were not, because you were leading another part of your life. What would have happened to Leanne if you had been at home? And take it back further. If you had been home, you probably wouldn’t have picked me up on the road last week, and where would I be?

“There is no blame here, Rainey. It is something that just happened, something that likely could not have been avoided, even if your father had been at the hospital. Placing blame never helps,” he added.

“I know,” she said, which was why she had not placed blame that he had taken a different route than she would have taken. She looked out at the grassland that was growing exceedingly dim, a golden dim with the setting sun.

“He misses Mama,” she said. “And isn’t it strange that he had a heart attack just like her? Mama had had a bit of heart trouble, but Daddy never has.” She paused and added, “He has now. I guess without Mama, we are all sort of falling apart.”

After another minute of watching the sun go down upon the land, she said, “I wish I had been there, because I wish I could be in control. But we aren’t, are we? We think we are, but we can hardly control ourselves, much less anyone or anything else in this world.”

He took her hand and pulled her over next to him. She laid her head on his shoulder and asked him to tell her all about what happens to the heart in an attack. He accepted this strange request readily and launched thoughtfully and in detail into all sorts of medical jargon. She would ask him the definition of the terms, and he would reply at length. This helped pass the time, and it must have bored her a little, too, as she fell asleep for fifty miles.

She chose to go straight to the hospital, even though this meant Lulu was stuck traveling with them, and Roscoe, too. To
take the animals home, though, would cost nearly an hour, and she was not willing to wait any longer than necessary to see her father. She also figured that at night there would be plenty of parking room, and there was. Charlene’s Suburban was there, but she didn’t see Freddy’s Lincoln.

“Freddy and Helen went home,” Charlene told her, when they came upon her in the ICU waiting area. Larry Joe, her eldest son, was with her, no doubt having driven her. Charlene had given up driving after the car wreck she and Rainey had had, the one in which Rainey had lost her baby. Charlene had been driving at that time.

“Joey’s down in Fort Worth, and Mary Lynn has the kids. Daddy is doing good. The doctors think he had two small heart attacks, but he is through that now. His heart rate is a little low, but they’re givin’ him something for it. He’s sleeping.”

In spite of Harry’s lengthy lesson in heart attacks, Rainey still wondered what a small heart attack was compared to a large one. She supposed the difference was life and death.

Charlene looked awfully pale, tired, but in her normal control, especially considering her abhorrence of hospitals. She, too, had remembered their mother’s admonition to be presentable in a crisis. She had on a flowing blue skirt and a loose blouse cinched at the waist with a concho-decorated leather belt, and her hair was neat as ever, even though when they came in she had been reclining on the couch with her eyes closed. Charlene had always been careful about her appearance, and she could rest without smudging one bit of mascara; she often lay back and looked dead, but this ability on her part had saved her face—she could pass easily for ten years younger.