“I’ve got to learn to control my temper,” Marisa muttered to the empty living room.
****
At lunchtime, Marisa returned to the singlewide to check on Mama and get her lunch together. She found artwork thumbtacked to the walls all over the mobile. Marisa couldn’t have found a thumbtack in that mobile home if the alternative meant being on the wrong end of a firing squad, but Mama had found some somewhere. Amazing. For a moment she worried about the holes the tacks made in the walls, but on second thought, Mama didn’t own the mobile and Terry was probably going to get rid of the damn thing anyway. So what difference did a few thumbtack holes make?
To her astonishment and Tanya’s, Mama was producing some interesting watercolor art. Abstract, but interesting. Jake did the framing for Tanya’s oils, so she’d had him frame a couple of Mama’s watercolors and they now hung them in Tanya’s museum. One of them had actually sold.
Where the ability came from Marisa didn’t know, but Mama appeared to have some knowledge of which colors went together and how. She and Tanya had conversations about how violet contrasted so nicely with gold and how mixing red and green made brown and Mama seemed to understand what Tanya told her.
She no longer spent her days in front of TV. Now she painted for hours. Sometimes she missed the paper and painted the tabletop, but most of the time, Marisa could wash off the damage. Though she was happy that Mama had something to do, she was annoyed that the person who had presented the watercolors had been Terry.
Terry, the will-o’-the-wisp. He was probably getting close to Fort Worth about now.
Something’s come up.
I’ll bet, Marisa thought. What had come up was probably in his shorts and he probably had a big date with some hot blonde.
“Hey, good job,” she told the artist, looking at a conglomeration of colors that could be a flower bed or a garden.
Her mother went into a long explanation, pointing out details with color-stained fingers.
The tension of the earlier confrontation with Lanny’s daughters began to melt away as an unavoidable truth came to rest within Marisa. This, here and now in this mobile home, was her real world, shared with a gentle woman incapable of the kind of selfish meanness demonstrated by Lisa Winegardner. Marrying Lanny would be thrusting Mama into an environment Lanny’s vicious daughters would be a part of. Marisa couldn’t do that to her mother.
****
Morning came with the blue skies and bright glory of a summer day in the desert. And all the heat.
As Marisa opened the cafe, Ben met her at the front door. She hadn’t seen him so early in the morning in weeks. He was shaved, his shaggy hair was combed. He had on a faded but clean tan T-shirt and clean khaki cargo shorts and she could tell he had bathed. He might be more sober than usual, but she still detected the faint odor of alcohol. “What are you doing out so early?” she asked him.
“Just checking to see how the world turns at seven o’clock.
Ben always spoke with a drawl, but this morning he didn’t have the alcohol-induced slur she had become accustomed to hearing from him. She led him through the flea market back to the café.
“How’s Raylene this mornin’?” he asked, following her like a puppy.
Marisa put coffee on to drip, drew water for fresh tea, then moved into the kitchen and turned on the flame under the griddle. “She was at the table painting when I left.”
The aroma of brewing coffee filled the air. Ben leaned a shoulder on the doorjamb and watched as she set up the kitchen for the day. Salt and pepper, a shaker of her own special blend of seasonings, olive oil--“Et cetera, et cetera,” she mumbled to herself as she worked.
“Ain’t that somethin’ she can paint pictures?”
“I’m blown away by it. So is Tanya.” The coffeemaker gurgled, signaling the brew wasready. “Get us a cup of coffee, will you?”
She flicked a few droplets of water on the griddle, testing the temperature. The drops bounced and transformed into steam, so she pulled two sausage patties from the freezer and placed them on the griddle. “Since you’re here, you’re having breakfast,” she declared. “Sausage and eggs.”
“Lord, girl, you’re always trying to feed me. What makes you think I want to eat?”
“Don’t argue,” she scolded. “Do it to please me. And start off with a cup of coffee.”
He backed out of the doorway and sauntered to the coffeepot. “Guess you heard about the ruckus out at Winegardner’s.”
Aha! The real reason Ben had come to the café so early. A riffle of uneasiness slid through Marisa. All night she had imagined Lanny’s kids swooping down on him like vultures. Turkey vultures. “What happened?”
“It was all about you, darlin’.”
Twenty-four hours hadn’t passed since yesterday’s appearance by Lisa and Kristy. Marisa had never figured out how Ben seemed to be the first to know every crumb of gossip. “I’m not surprised. Lisa was in here giving me hell yesterday.”
Ben returned to the doorway, handed her a cup of black coffee with a trembling hand. “Poor ol’ Lanny. Guess he had it out with his kids.” He set his mug on the counter and dug a crushed pack of Camels from his T-shirt pocket. “I hear they left the ranch late last night, worried about where their next new Jag’s comin’ from.”
Marisa gasped and frowned. “You can’t smoke in my kitchen.”
Ben growled and mumbled as he returned the cigarettes to his pocket.
Marisa continued to frown as guilt for her role in
upsetting Lanny’s family pinched her. “I thought they had trust funds. I thought they could buy anything they wanted forever.”
“Well, darlin’, what Daddy giveth, Daddy can taketh away.”
“Shit,” Marisa muttered.
“There ain’t nothing Lanny ain’t done for those kids, but not a one of them gives a shit about him.” Ben sighed, picked up his mug and took a long swig of coffee. “They never were Lanny’s kids anyway. They were always just Joyce’s. That woman spent most of her time on this earth turning those kids against their daddy.”
Joyce. Lanny’s deceased wife.
Marisa’s memory spun backward, but Joyce Winegardner was no more than a gauzy, if well-dressed, image. Marisa had already left Agua Dulce by the time Joyce passed on. Ben, on the other hand, probably knew her as well as he knew Lanny. Marisa had to ask, “Why would she do that?”
“She was as unhappy a human being as I ever seen. A fish out of water, for sure. She hated everything about Agua Dulce, hated the ranching business.” He pronounced it “bid-ness.”
With so much distance between her and Lanny’s ages, Marisa had never been interested in knowing the history of Lanny’s
marriage. Tanya’s tantrum over moving to Arizona with Jake waltzed through her mind. Marisa was weary of people who refused to step up and handle the consequences of their decisions. She couldn’t remember ever having that luxury herself. “If that’s how she felt, why did she marry him and come here?”
Marisa the Cynic.
Ben gave a deep heh-heh-heh. “Ain’t that obvious?”
“Yeah, it is,” she said, aware her own reasoning might not be any different from that of Lanny’s deceased wife. Financial security was a potent motivator. She flipped the sausage patties and placed the cast-iron press on top of them, then broke two eggs onto the hot griddle.
“Think you’ll go through with it, darlin’?”
She hesitated, then said, “Go through with what?”
“Don’t get coy with your ol’ Ben, sweet girl. My thinking might be a little cloudy, but yours ain’t. You know damn well what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.”
Marisa set her jaw. Her decision was nobody’s business. “Do you think you’ll quit drinking this year?”
“I’ll prob’ly quit drinkin’ before you marry Lanny.”
A lump swelling in her throat threatened to stop her flurry of activity, but she pushed on and dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. “That’s probably right. I doubt it’ll ever happen.”
“Too friggin’ bad,” Ben said, running a hand through his combed hair and ruining the neatness. “Just too friggin’ bad to let ungrateful kids run your life. Glad I ain’t got any snot-nosed brats trying to tell me what to do.”
She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled. “But you’ve got me.”
He was studying the surface of his coffee. “You’d be good for ol’ Lanny, Marisa.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” A tear escaped and trailed down beside her nose, the delayed reaction to Lisa’s attack. “It’s too hard, Ben.”
She turned the eggs too carelessly and broke both yolks. She looked up at him. His gaze quickly veered from her face to the semi-liquid yolks leaking yellow beyond the edges of the whites. “Hey, broke eggs don’t make no never-mind to me. It’s all going to the same place.”
She managed a sniffly chuckle as she scooped the breakfast onto a plate and passed it to him. “It’d be too hard for me and Lanny both. My life’s already complicated enough. What’s the point in doing something that can only cause trouble for him? No, I’m pretty sure I’m going back to Plan A. I feel bad for Lanny, but he’ll have to soothe his soul and spend his money with someone else.”
Carrying the plate, Ben shuffled around the end of the lunch counter to a stool. “Just too friggin’ bad,” he mumbled. He reached for the salt and pepper shakers, sprinkled salt on his eggs, then covered them with a blanket of pepper.
“Do you ever wonder what’s going to happen to all of us, Ben?”
“Nah. I don’t give a shit.” He picked up his knife and fork and whacked his eggs into a hundred pieces.
“You do, too. You just don’t want to admit it.” She sipped her coffee. “Trying to figure all of it out is driving me crazy.”
“You know something, baby girl? Half the time, I think Raylene’s better off than any of us. Look at her. She’s happy all the time, don’t have a clue what’s happening and she’s got you to take care of her. I might wish for a deal like that m’self.” He dug into his breakfast.
Marisa refilled his coffee mug. “Don’t ever wish Alzheimer’s disease on yourself, Ben.”
“Maybe I’ve already got it. Rachel used to say I was drowning brain cells faster than they could recover.” He sopped a piece of toast in his eggs and shoved it into his mouth. “’Course it was her fault most of the time that I was doing it.”
Rachel. The song lyrics Marisa had seen on Ben’s table flashed in her mind. She hadn’t heard him so much as say Rachel’s name in months, maybe years. She rounded the end of the lunch counter and sat down beside him. “You haven’t mentioned her in ages.”
He didn’t reply at first, just concentrated on his breakfast. Marisa didn’t push. He had always kept his relationship with the mysterious Rachel private. He pushed his plate away and drew his mug closer. “Nothin’ to mention. That song’s come to an end on a pitiful sour note. She’s out o’ the picture for good this time and I’m recoverin’.” He pulled his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket again.
Marisa sighed, but didn’t stop him. At least he wasn’t in her kitchen.
“She was somethin’, that woman,” he went on, lighting up. He inhaled deeply and exhaled a stream of smoke. Marisa reached up the counter and dragged an ashtray to him. “Yessir, my sun, my moon, the evenin’ star. Had hair black as yours and eyes the color o’ coal. Yessir, one look and she could turn my knees to jelly....And one word and she could make me want to do murder.”
“What happened to her?”
“Nothin’, I guess. She’s doin’ all the things most married women do.”
Marisa felt her eyes pop wide and didn’t try to hide her shock. “Rachel got married?”
“She always was married, darlin’. Always was.”
A frown tugged at Marisa’s brow. Mama had never told her that. “Ben, that’s awful.”
Big sigh. “I hung on for years. I used to think it’d all work out with her and me. Maybe I’d bring her out here, maybe build her a nice house around Pecos or Kermit or somewhere, but she never stuck with me long enough at one time for me to do it.”
He lifted his mug and gulped a drink of coffee. “She played me, always setting me up against her husband. Calling me up at two in the morning, sayin’ she’d had it, wantin’ me to come get her. I always did. Then she’d tell me she was goin’ back to him to end it and they’d kiss and make up.” He drew such a deep drag his cigarette the tip lit up like a beacon. “It took me a lot o’ years, but I finally told her I couldn’t keep showing up in Nashville ever’ time they had a breakup, then leavin’ town ever’ time they had a reconsh—rec-on-shiliation. After that, I just left for good.”
Now Marisa knew why Ben had seemed so restless for so many years. He had been in love with a married woman his whole life. Indeed he had moved back and forth between Agua Dulce and Nashville uncountable times. And now that he had come here to settle down, he was soon to be uprooted again.
“God, Ben,” she said softly. “That’s so sad.”
Ben raked ash off the end of his cigarette into the ashtray Marisa had given him. “Nah. It was sad a long time ago, but...” His words trailed off. “You know, baby girl, there ain’t much that’s fun about getting’ old, but one thing that’s nice is stuff you used to think was important stops matterin’ so much.”
Marisa couldn’t resist the opportunity to learn something significant about Ben’s life. “Did Mama know about Rachel?”