The Secrets She Keeps (14 page)

“I am in no way going to buy him a drink. You’re crazy. He’s a stranger. I would never do something like that. And just because Thomas and I are having problems doesn’t give me an excuse to hit on the first guy I see.”

“Hey, a restorative affair with a cowboy was practically mandatory in the old days.”

“This isn’t the old days.”

“Do it for Nash. For forest-service relations.” Shaye wiggled her eyebrows. “Your eyeballs practically fell out when you saw that guy.”

“Shaye, come on.”

“Okay! I was just joking!” she said, but she was laughing loud, drawing attention to us. Jesus! I remembered this maneuver of hers from back in high school, the oversize display of a good time that made everyone turn around and stare.

Of course, Kit Covey turned around. He smiled when he recognized me, and Shaye waved her hand for them to join us. This was exactly how Shaye ended up with the unapproachable Carl Decker (senior year, just after nice Jay with the vest), and with every guy before and after him.

I was nervous. I don’t know why. Well, the way he looked, for one. And I was in a bar. When was the last time I was in a bar? Introductions were made. The other man was Steve Miller, a bureau public-affairs officer. Steve’s nose was red from his glass of wine. His head was shiny from heat, but he still wore his suit jacket over his T-shirt.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked. “Of all places.”

“What are you doing here, is more like it. We stay in this hotel whenever we work in the area,” Kit said.
Film-moment coincidence, ha.
“Rangers, ranchers, and cowboys. We’ve been coming here for years.”

“
We’ve
been coming here for years. Or, at least, we came when we were kids,” I said.

“Our aunt Nash said they used to bring the
gals
here,” Shaye said. “As part of their ‘Reno-vation.’ The bar was called something else then, I think. Not the Nugget.”

Steve Miller gestured with his empty glass, caught the eye of the waitress, and we all ordered more drinks. Shaye joked about him being a musician, and he laughed like he hadn’t heard that a million times before. They asked us if it really did rain all the time in Seattle, and we asked if they’d ever been bitten by a rattlesnake. A live band set up on a small stage and started to play. The place had filled with people and I hadn’t even noticed. This was what they came for: dust-kicking, boot-stomping music, sung by a man with a voice like a whiskey sour, as a woman played fiddle, her chin down, right arm flying, sweat starting at her temples. Shaye said she couldn’t sit still during a certain song, and she and Steve Miller pushed into the crowd to dance.

“You want to?” Kit shouted, but I shook my head. We sat across from each other and leaned in to talk. I could feel his warm breath on my face. I could smell the mixture of beer and an indefinable something else that was just Kit.

“Well, that’s a relief,” he said. “I always get embarrassed when they clear the dance floor when I get out there.”

“Is it that slide you do? Across the floor on your knees?”

“Balancing a beer mug on my forehead? You saw me?”

“On the news, the friendly part of the broadcast at the end, when they show cute kids and people’s dogs. That thong was hard to forget, though,” I said.

Kit Covey’s laugh made nice crinkles by his eyes. He looked at me straight on, turning his glass in a circle in his plain, ring-less hands.

“Your eyes are really blue,” he said.

“It’s the disco lights,” I joked.

“No, I mean it. They’re startling.”

It was strange, but this mention of my eyes made me realize they were another thing I’d forgotten. In college, Will Adams told me he could look at them forever, and even Nathan Jarrison had said he’d never seen a blue like that before. Every day I looked at those eyes and never really noticed them. Kit tipped his beer back and took a long swallow. There was a shy energy between us, an awkward moment, and I felt the old crackle of being seen, the thrill of my own command, my eyes, or the ass in the jeans that might make a man look twice. It occurred to me that maybe I was still beautiful. What a shocking idea, though suddenly I thought it might even be true.

I could never do any of the things Shaye had joked about, but I could do this. I could feel like myself for a night. The weight of Thomas’s mood was nowhere near the desert, and, free of that mood, I felt an unfamiliar glee and I heard a friendly murmur, welcoming me back, telling me that it was a good thing to be in my own body. I sipped my drink. I felt sure of myself, in a way I hadn’t in a long time. Admittedly, that second margarita was also starting a party inside me. “So, tell me. Is there any truth to all those movies about horse whispering?”

“Well, anyone who works with animals sees the way it is. They’re more like us than people want to believe. Horses, all animals. The distance we put between our species—it’s just plain arrogance on our part. You treat them with understanding and respect, and there you have it, all the magical BS of horse whispering. Still, the wild ones? They do what they want. I could shout and they wouldn’t hear me. They don’t listen to anybody.”

“I saw them,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“They were right in the front pasture of the ranch.”

“Bet that was a damn mess.”

“You got that right.”

“They say it changes a person, though. Seeing them. That’s the lore.”

I held out my hands, looked them over.

“Not yet, huh?” He grinned. His eyes—they were their own strong blue. A blue with experience, a blue that had managed to hold on to playfulness, even through all those brutal years of adolescence and beyond. “Well, you should come out. We’re just past your aunt’s lake, setting up. I’ll show you what we’re doing.”

“P.R.”

“Leave the attorney at the ranch.”

The song ended. It had gotten late, and my head felt strange. We needed to get home. Maybe I’d had too much to drink. I felt a warm buzz, the sense of liftoff. It was the alcohol, and my own sweet power.

The band stopped for a break. Shaye and Steve Miller were finished dancing. Kit Covey downed the last of his beer. Shaye and I gathered our purses and said goodbye. And then we were back in the tomblike quiet of Shaye’s suburban tank. New-car smell merged with the liquor on our breath. There was a pair of small soccer cleats in the back and a half-filled water bottle, along with an empty, flattened, snack-sized package of Doritos.

“I can’t believe you danced with Steve,” I said. I felt like I could stay up all night, talking. Joy and late-hour energy filled me. What was a stupid sailing trip? I took my shoes off. I hadn’t been up until—I checked the clock—
1:00
A.M
.
in a long, long time.

“I can’t believe you
didn’t
dance with the forest-service man! It wouldn’t have meant anything, Cal. Wasn’t that fun?”

It was. It was so much fun, I didn’t even feel like myself. And it continued to be fun as Shaye popped another CD into the player. Billy Idol was so right. If I had the chance, I
would
teach the world to dance.

We whispered and giggled as we let ourselves into the ranch house. Tex looked confused at the middle-of-the-night activity. He greeted us at the door with squinting eyes and wobbly, suddenly awake legs.

“Sorry we’re past curfew, Dad,” Shaye said to him.

“There wasn’t any alcohol and the parents were there the whole time,” I said, even though I’d never done stuff like that. I wished I had. I wished I’d embraced every possible rebellious moment. I wished I’d grown out my hair and kissed bad boys and danced and danced.

“Hey, Cal, next we’re going to be tossing our rings into this.”

It was the vase on the piano. It had been there since the days of the divorce ranch, and it was filled with wedding rings. It had been in that spot on the piano for so long that I’d forgotten all about it; I hadn’t even really seen it there, either. Not for years.

There it was, the truth of it. Things could vanish, even as they sat right in front of you.

Lilly Marcel swirls her hand in the gold. She scoops the rings into her palm and holds them close to her face, as if she’s taking a drink of water from a creek bed. She studies the bands and then chooses one, holds it in the air.

“Whose was this?” she asks.

“I don’t know. There’ve been so many,” Nash says. They’ve gathered in the main room. Jack should be arriving any minute to drive the women into town for the night. He usually brings another cowboy or two along, men he knows from the Flying W or Washoe Pines. Nash will have to have a quiet night at home. It’s disappointing to be left behind. She’s forgotten where in her book she left off.

“Make something up,” Hadley says. She’s the one who is good at that. Her typewriter goes all hours of the night.

“Let me see,” Nash says. The ring itself brings back no memories. But, wait: There’s an engraving inside.
My beloved Olivia, forever.
“It was Olivia Remington’s. She married—”

Veronica interrupts. “Isn’t this confidential information? You know, same as a priest?”

They all laugh. “I heard my priest yawn during confession,” Ellen says.

“No!” Lilly drops her jaw.

“I did! He’s really old, but still! Tell us, Nash.”

“Hmm. Olivia was married to…I think his name was Oscar. He never had a job after they married. He told her he was just having a spell of bad luck, but it lasted years.”

“The old bad-luck story,” Veronica said. “The kind of bad luck that makes you lazy.”

“I can tell you a story like that without even using my imagination,” Hadley said. “I could show you photographs, even.”

“This one,” Lilly Marcel said. It’s a band of gold with a moonstone center.

Nash takes it. She holds it up. Through the ring far off, past the front yard, she sees the brown wood of the barn, where Zorro and Maggie and Starlight and Bluebell are likely settled into their stalls for the night. Jack and Danny would have removed their halters, sponged the saddle marks off their bodies, and checked their feet after the long trek they’d made that day up the Del Mar trail.

“Mrs. Barb Halloway,” Nash says. She doesn’t know it was hers for sure, but she’s getting into the spirit of the game. “Mr. Halloway would measure her hemlines with a tape to make sure they weren’t too short. He accused her of flirting with every man she passed—which was not many, since he didn’t allow her to leave the house without him. When she came here, she didn’t tell him where she was. The first time in years that she wore a bathing suit in public was at our very own pool.”

It may not have been Mrs. Halloway’s ring, but she remembered Mrs. Halloway and her husband. It seemed to Nash that some marriages were doomed from the get-go; the minute two sets of eyes met across a room, it was done for if one of the people was just plain bad or broken. There were always signs they ignored, the women said—the way he snatched her menu before she could decide, the harsh words to her mother, the way he drank. Nash was sure plenty of men would say the same thing—certainly Mr. Fletcher would think back and recall Mrs. Fletcher’s loud laugh, the particular way she languished on a chaise. The husband of Gina Francesca must have certainly seen her dramatic sobs and her endless, mysterious illnesses and noticed the way she clung to his coat whenever he left home. Doc Bolger was summoned to the ranch five times in her six-week stay, and she clung to
his
coat. The themes repeated. That was clear. Drunks, cheaters, bullies, and liars; the helpless, the hungry—for attention and money and more. The ignored signs of the bad and broken, and the men and women who rode in to rescue and nurse so they might be beaten down for their efforts.

It seemed simple enough. Avoid those people if you wanted half a chance at happiness. Flee at the first sign of a big ego and a mean streak. But it apparently wasn’t simple in the least. A mean streak could be a magnet.

But then, too, you had the marriages that didn’t appear to be doomed at all. The ones between two good but tired people, or the well meaning but mismatched. The ones worn down by terrible circumstances or the persistent drone of daily life. Like poor Mrs. Drake, who still smiled when she talked about Mr. Drake. Their child had died. And Franny Frederick. She talked about Mr. Frederick with pride and respect, but Mr. Frederick had a dream that they should move to the French countryside, and Franny didn’t want to move to the French countryside. Still, she spoke wistfully of him buying a house with a thatched roof and making his own sausages. On the last day, right there on the court steps, she changed her mind about leaving him.

Of course, there were also the marriages that lasted, and she shouldn’t forget those. No one should. Under thousands of rooftops there were people they’d never see at the ranch, people with marriages like her parents’, ones of deep love and faithfulness and friendship, or even just stubbornness, in spite of everything that came their way. Her mother was never the same after her father died. Years after he was gone, Nash saw her father’s photo on the bed pillow next to her mother’s, moved from its usual place on the nightstand. With all the trips to the Washoe County Courthouse, it was maybe most important to remember those unions above all
. Union
—the word sounded as gentle and resolute as flower petals joined at the same center.