“Oh, sure. Your mama was one o’ the few people I ever told my secrets to. Tight-lipped, your ma was. You could tell her anything and she’d die before she’d ever breathe a word of it.”
“Did she know Rachel?”
“Nope. Nobody around here knew her.” He took another drag off his cigarette, squinting from the smoke.
“Where is she now?”
“Why, Nashville, o’ course.”
“Is she the reason you haven’t been back there?”
“I don’t want to chance running into her, Marisa. I just don’t trust m’self. You ever hear that song, “North Dakota Boy” by them Canada boys?”
“It’s been a while. It’s a good song.”
“Well, that’s ol’ Ben Seagraves in that song. If anybody hauls me back to Nashville, it’ll be after I’m dead.”
“Did you sell your place there?”
“Yep. Got a good price fer it, too. Put the money in the stock market. It’s bringing me a hell of a lot more return than that house ever did. Now, I can buy enough Jack to drown m’self if I want to.”
“When we all have to leave here, where will you go, Ben?”
“Don’t know. Fer now, I’m stayin’ put. Terry told me he ain’t touchin’ the trailer park. He’s even gonna make it better.”
“One thing’s for sure. That isn’t true of Pecos Belle’s or the beauty shop.” Quiet fell between them. She looked away, down the counter at the kitchen doorway, the tiny sanctum where she spent so much of her time. What would she do when she could no longer retreat to it?
“I’ve got some replies back on the resumes I sent out,” she said. “I’m going to follow up on them. One place that contacted me is in Midland. With Mama’s doctor being there, that wouldn’t be too bad.”
Ben tamped out his cigarette in the ashtray she had given him. “Lord, Marisa. I can’t imagine this place without you and your ma.” Suddenly his eyes teared and he wiped them with his fingers. “Even if she does crazy stuff, I still like seeing her around.”
His hand went to his pants pocket and came out with a flask. He didn’t even bother to pour a shot into his coffee. He drank straight from the flask. “I gotta go, baby girl,” he said hoarsely, fumbling to screw the lid back onto the flask. He got to his feet and dug into his pocket again, came up with a handful of money and laid it on the counter. “Once when I’s real pissed off, I wrote a song about Rachel. One o’ these days when I’m drunk enough, I’ll play it for you.”
Unable to think of a better response, Marisa smiled. “Sure. I can’t wait to hear it.”
As he cleared her line of sight, Marisa couldn’t keep from being amazed at all she had learned just in the past few weeks about the people around her. Ben was an emotional cripple. He had wasted his entire life being in love with a woman he couldn’t have and who had no loyalty. Was that the common basis for his and Mama’s long friendship—being in love with someone neither of them could ever have? Living like a hermit, Ben had numbed his pain with Jack Daniel’s. Mama had numbed hers with hard work.
Terry Ledger and his plans had been a catalyst for all sorts of skeletons to come out of closets.
Marisa rose and went to her kitchen. She had a lot to do. Today’s lunch special was chicken fried steak, real mashed potatoes and cream gravy. As she peeled potatoes, she thought of Lanny and the controversy swirling around the two of them. Had she lost her mind, thinking she could marry him and they would live on an island known as the mountains in Colorado, with no thought to his family and what they might think? Or no contact? His three kids might be shits, but they were still his offspring and he supported them. Financially, anyway. She couldn’t,
wouldn’t
, be the one who created a bigger rift between him and his kids.
Nope. Not happening.
But there was more. How could she marry Lanny, or any man, when her heart and mind were bound up with Terry Ledger? She thought of him day and night, how easy it had been to kiss him, the sweetness of his lips, how comfortable and secure she felt in his arms. She thought of his intense eyes, which said so much more than his mouth and of the emotion she sensed in him. How was it possible she had these feelings if he didn’t have them, too?
Something deep within her told her she had to let this “thing” with Terry, whatever it was, play itself out. Even if it had a bad outcome, she had to give it a chance.
She called the XO. When one of the hands answered she left a message for Lanny to drop by the café.
Chapter 19
At noon, Lanny did just that, wearing a hangdog expression. He sat down at the far end of the lunch counter right outside the kitchen doorway, a plate of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes before him. “Best steak I ever ate,” Lanny said.
“Thanks, Lanny,” Marisa replied, breezing past him with glasses of iced tea.
A dozen customers were scattered around the dining room. Besides the chicken-fried steak and peach pies, Marisa had made enchilada casserole and black bean salad, a labor-intensive recipe that worked off some of her nervous energy. Since she was well known for the dish, posting the menu on the sandwich board out front brought in the locals traveling the highway and made a larger than usual lunch crowd.
“I’m sorry, Rissy,” Lanny said softly, as she returned to the kitchen and prepared three plates of casserole and salad. “She shouldn’t have come in here. She’s too much like her mother.”
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry for, Lanny.” Marisa kept her voice low and out of hearing range of customers. “Believe it or not, I see her point.”
She positioned the three plates--one on her wrist, one in her left hand and one in her right—and started out to deliver the food. Having learned to wait tables as a child, she was an expert. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she told Lanny. After taking the food to a table of women who had come from Tanya’s salon, she returned to her post behind the lunch counter.
“Rissy,” Lanny said, “these past weeks have been real good. For me, anyway. I’d sorta forgot how it felt to have the company of a lady and have a good time. I thought you were having a good time, too.”
“I was, Lanny, but we can’t just blow off your kids. They’re your family.”
A customer caught her eye and pointed to his empty glass. She picked up a pitcher of tea, scurried to his table and filled his glass, then made the rounds filling other empty glasses. Customers stopped her and gave her raves on the food. When she returned to the lunch counter, while she had the tea pitcher in hand, she refilled Lanny’s glass.
He wrapped a wide, work-scarred hand around the glass. “They don’t act like family. Or at least, not like my idea of family. All they want from me is money. And they’ve got that.” He lifted the glass and drank.
“I know, Lanny, and I wish it wasn’t that way. You’ve done so much for them.”
His shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Some tell me I’ve done too much. They say I’ve ruined ’em. Maybe so. But what good is it having all this damn money if you can’t share it with the ones you love?...They don’t have anything to do with what goes on between you and me, Rissy.”
She set the pitcher on the back counter so she could face him and speak quietly. “Don’t you see how hard everything would be if we got married? It doesn’t matter so much that your family would hate me. I’m used to people being pissed off at me. But they’d resent Mama, too, and she’s helpless to defend herself.”
He looked up at her with solemn eyes. “Rissy, if you’re not gonna say yes, don’t let it be because Lisa jumped on you. If you don’t like me and don’t think we could get along, that’s one thing, but don’t let people who won’t be part of our lives scare you off.”
Looking into his deep brown eyes, all she could think was that both of his hateful daughters had his eyes. Blood ties that couldn’t be denied or swept under the rug. “Lanny, the only way to remove your kids from your life is to do something meaner than you’re capable of. And I’m not sure you should do it, even if you could. Bottom line, there’s just no way a man like you can divorce himself from his kids. Besides, I don’t want to live in
a family quarrel. I remember how it used to be when Mama and Aunt Rosemary were always fighting.”
“I’m getting old, Rissy. I’m lonesome. Seeing what’s happened to Raylene has taught me a lesson. When she was my age, she was still okay. A little funny-acting, but still okay. Not that many years has passed and now look at her. I want a shot at being happy while I still know what’s going on.”
“Oh, Lanny, I want you to be happy, too,” Marisa said, gliding past the reminder that just a short twelve years ago, Alzheimer’s Disease was something that happened to someone else and Mama had still been in good shape. “If I’ve ever met anyone who deserves to be happy, you do. But I’m not your answer. Your kids think I’m a gold digger. Maybe they’d feel less threatened if you found someone a little older. I
am
the same age as Lisa, you know. You
could
be my dad.”
His head slowly shook. “You’re the one I picked out to spend the rest of my life with. Don’t say no just yet. Let’s let things alone a while.”
She sighed. “Oh, Lanny, really—”
“Just let things go along,” he said. “Time passing makes a lot of difference. Sometimes a problem has a way of working itself out with no help from anybody.”
She didn’t raise a protest again, but she knew the fragile bond that had evolved between them, whatever its definition and origin, was broken. Lisa and Kristy’s visit hadn’t scared her off, but it had brought her to her senses, which, maybe, was the same thing. That, and the gossip from half-drunk Ben.
Lanny gave her a hug and left the café. She had no idea if he would ever be back.
As his pickup pulled away, Marisa began to load the dishwasher. Tanya came in. She had been at the singlewide helping mama paint. She stopped at the display windows and watched Lanny’s pickup disappear on the horizon, then came back to the café. She was wearing jeans and flat-heeled sandals. Unusual attire for her.
“You tell him you’re gonna marry him?” she asked.
“No. How was art class?”
“Okay. I can’t get over how Raylene takes to it. It’s so weird.” She pulled a bent package of Virginia Slims out of her bra and lit up. “She’s calling me Tina today.”
Marisa couldn’t keep from chuckling. It seemed that lately Mama called Tanya a different name every time she saw her. “You want something?”
“A Coke, maybe.” Tanya dug into her jeans pocket and clapped a handful of change on the counter.Marisa wiped her hands on a towel and went to the Coke dispenser. “Thank God I don’t have any customers this afternoon,” Tanya said as Marisa wiped drew a Coke into a Styrofoam cup. “I’m not up to listening to people’s troubles.”
Setting the Coke and a straw in front of her neighbor, Marisa took a second look and saw that she was still wearing yesterday’s makeup. “Are you sick?”
Tanya looked up at her, tears glistening in her mascara-smudged eyes. “Jake told me to get out.” A tear leaked from one eye and trailed down the side her nose. “I’ve got to get home and get packed.”
“You’re kidding,” Marisa said, but she could see that Tanya’s statement was no joke.
She knew little of Tanya and Jake’s history. The most she had ever heard Tanya say was they met in a honky-tonk on Friday night, got married on Saturday and Jake moved her to Agua Dulce on Sunday. Still, Jake throwing her out was the last thing Marisa would have ever expected. And Tanya’s reaction was even more surprising. Marisa had thought it was Jake who needed Tanya, not vise versa. Had she been wrong all along about their marriage? Had that pesky but usually accurate intuition failed her? “Wait a second. Where do you think you’re going?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve gotta be gone before he gets home.”
As far as Marisa knew, for family, Tanya had one brother. He was in the army, stationed in Alaska. Her mother was deceased and her estranged father had remarried and moved to Florida. Marisa rounded the end of the lunch counter and took a seat beside the hairdresser. “What’s going on with you two? And what about your shops?”
Tanya used the end of her cigarette to light another.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Marisa scolded. “It’s bad for you.”
“BFD.” Tanya looked up and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “Jake doesn’t really love me, you know.”
“I thought it was the opposite. I thought you didn’t love him.”
She shook her head and made a deep sniff. “I don’t know if I do, but I did think we were used to each other.”
“Look, Tanya, Jake’s a good guy. I’ll bet y’all could make up and put things back together and—”
“Marisa,” she said, her lips tightly drawn, “he doesn’t need me. He’s like every other fucking cowboy I’ve ever met. They don’t need a damn living, breathing, thing but their horses and their dogs.”
Marisa’s eyes squinted involuntarily. Other than a stray, she couldn’t remember seeing a dog around Agua Dulce. “When did y’all get a dog?”
“We didn’t get a dog. That’s what I mean. Jake’s even worse than most. He doesn’t even need a dog.”
Marisa cocked her head and arched her brow. Good assessment of most of the cowboys she knew. She had never doubted that men who chose cowboying for a living had to have done so for deep, mysterious reasons, because a cowboy’s life was far from easy and the pay was awful. “You’ve been together a long time. That has to count for something.”