The Seventh Mother (2 page)

I
know it was stupid, moving in with Brannon so fast. But I was lonely before he came to the campground, and he was funny and sweet and so good with his daughter. And my God, he looked so
good
. When he and Jenny first arrived at camp, I watched him around the place for a few days before I talked to him, his dark hair just curling damp at the base of his neck, his arms and chest muscled and taut under his white T-shirts. He was something to watch, all right, so lean and tanned and glistening with sweat. Even Zella Fay at the diner said so, as we stared at him out the window over lunch one day.

“Yeah, he’s a looker, all right.” Zella Fay poured more coffee into my cup and almost smiled, watching Brannon outside, hauling wood to the fire pit for the big bonfire that night. “And the little girl seems like a good kid,” she added, turning from the window. “She’s real polite. Sometimes she even helps me with the dishes. I give her a dollar.”

I’d seen the daughter around, too.

“How old do you think she is?” I asked.

“Ten,” Zella Fay said. “Eleven in August.”

“I wonder where her mother is.” I was fishing now.

“Dead,” Zella Fay said. “She died when Jenny was three.”

I raised my eyebrows. Normally, Zella Fay didn’t engage in gossip, but she was full of information today.

“Jenny hangs out here sometimes when it’s too hot outside,” she said. “Does her schoolwork at a booth or just follows me around. She seems kind of lonely.”

“I’ll bet,” I agreed. “It must be hard on a kid, moving around the way they do.”

Zella Fay nodded and swiped the counter with a towel.

“Seems like he’s a good dad,” she said, glancing out the window toward Brannon. He was stacking logs in the fire pit now, building a balanced pyramid. “I’ve never heard him raise his voice to her. He pretty much dotes on her.”

“That’s nice.” I smiled to myself, watching Brannon build the pyramid. “It must be nice to have a dad who dotes on you.”

When I left the diner that day, I stopped by the fire pit and introduced myself.

“Hey, I’m Emma. I work with the horses.” I smiled at him.

He wiped his forehead with a blue bandana and grinned back at me—a crooked, beautiful, wide grin.

“I’m Brannon,” he said, holding out his hand. “Brannon Bohner. Nice to meet you.”

“Looks like hot work,” I said, taking his hand and nodding at the pyramid.

“At least it’s not muggy,” he said. “Last summer I worked at a campground in Alabama. Imagine heat like this with ninety-percent humidity. It felt like I was working in a sauna.”

“Zella Fay just made a fresh batch of iced tea,” I said.

“That sounds good.” He wiped his forehead again. “Will you join me?”

So I went back into the diner, where Zella Fay was still watching us, and sat down in a booth instead of at the counter.

“Can we get two iced teas, Zella Fay?”

She raised an eyebrow at me now, then poured two big glasses of tea and set them on the table before us.

“How ’bout some pie?” She halfway smiled at Brannon. “I got fresh peach pie today.”

“That sounds good.” Brannon smiled at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Has Jenny been in this afternoon?”

“Not since lunch.” Zella Fay waddled into the kitchen, returning with a huge slice of pie, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. “She’s down at the river with the kids from seventeen, the pop-up. Their mama’s with them. She’s all right.”

He nodded before digging into the pie. Zella Fay stood at the table, watching him chew.

“Best peach pie I ever had,” he said, swallowing.

She waddled back to the kitchen, smiling.

“So . . .” He turned his attention to me, that crooked smile thawing the cold places in my past. “Are you from around here?”

I shook my head. “Arizona,” I said.

“Beautiful country,” he said. “How did you end up at the Flying J?”

“Oh, that’s a long story,” I said, laughing. “I’ll bore you with it sometime. How about you? How did you find your way here?”

He took a long drink of iced tea and sighed, relaxing into the red-vinyl booth. “We’ve been moving around for a few years now, my daughter and me.”

“I’ve seen her around the place,” I said. “She’s a beauty.”

He nodded, grinning. “She takes after her mom, that’s for sure.”

“Actually, I think she looks a lot like you . . . at least from what I’ve seen.”

I felt myself blushing and hoped he didn’t think I was some kind of stalker. But he just grinned again.

“She’s a good girl,” he said. “She’s smart, too. And she seems to like it here.”

“Maybe sometime she’d like to come see the horses?”

“I bet she’d love that,” he said. “Thanks.”

He rose and wrapped the bandana around his head.

“I’d better get back to work.”

“I’ll see you around, Brannon.”

I watched him walk back to the fire pit. He was something to look at, all right. Behind me, I heard a snort. Zella Fay was laughing behind the counter.

“You be careful what you wish for, honey. That man is dragging around a whole lot of baggage.”

“You mean his daughter?”

“For starters,” she said.

I shook my head and smiled. “He seems like a nice enough guy.”

“Just be careful,” she repeated. She waddled back to the kitchen, glancing back over her shoulder. “Just you be real careful.”

A week later, Brannon asked me to join him for lunch with his daughter. We were at Zella Fay’s, of course. It was the only place close by to eat. I watched him order for himself and then for Jenny, shaking his head when she said she wanted a milk shake to drink.

“That’s a dessert,” he said. “You can have milk or juice with lunch.”

“Juice,” she said. “But can I have a milk shake after?”

“Let’s see how you do with your lunch.”

Zella Fay brought us big bowls of chili, a small plate of jalapeños, and a pan of cornbread. Her one good eye locked onto me, as if to say again, “Just be careful.” I smiled at her.

“So,” Brannon said, putting his arm around Jenny’s shoulders. “Did you know that Emma works with the horses in the barn?”

“That’s cool,” the girl said.

I breathed in deep and said, “I was wondering if maybe you’d like to visit with them after lunch.”

I smiled at her. After a long minute, she smiled back. It was a cautious little smile. It almost broke my heart.

“I’d like that,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

Jenny took to the horses right away. More important, the horses took to her. She was very gentle and spoke quietly to them, offering carrots and apple slices carefully in her outstretched palm. Sometimes I let her give them sugar cubes as a special treat. Before long, she became my constant shadow whenever I was at the barn. She shoveled hay and manure without my asking. I taught her how to brush down the horses, being careful never to stand behind them, where she might get kicked. And I discovered early on that Brannon had been right. Jenny was as smart as a whip.

“How do you know how much to feed them?”

Jenny was petting Buck’s nose while I brushed the huge horse down.

“It depends on how big each horse is and how much exercise it gets,” I said. “Buck here is almost two thousand pounds and he does the trail almost every day, so he needs more food. Angel”—I nodded to the dappled horse in the stall across the way—“she’s a little older and a little bit smaller, and she doesn’t get ridden as much, so she needs a little less.”

“So it’s a percentage of their weight?” Jenny looked at me with her startlingly blue eyes, so at odds with the dark hair curling to her shoulders.

I stared at her for a minute. It seemed a complicated concept for a ten-year-old.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “It’s a percentage of their weight, plus their activity. In the summer, they get most everything they need from grazing, and I supplement with some hay. Come winter, they’ll get more hay plus a little bit of grain.”

“Do you stay here all winter, too?” Jenny’s blue eyes widened.

“Yep, I’m a full-timer here.”

“You’re lucky.”

The little girl leaned her forehead against Buck’s nose and sighed.

“It’s plenty cold here in the winter,” I said, watching her closely. “And we get a lot of snow. It’s darned isolated, once the snow starts.”

“I bet it’s pretty, though.” Her voice sounded far away.

“It is beautiful,” I agreed. “But it’s not for everyone.”

“Daddy says we’re going to Kentucky this fall. He’s going to work in a big warehouse until after Christmas.”

“That sounds nice,” I said. “I’ve never been to Kentucky.”

“We drove through it before. It’s okay.” Jenny shrugged. “It’s a lot like everyplace else.”

“So,” I said, “how many places have you lived?”

She thought a minute before answering.

“We lived in Indiana first, I think. Then we bought the trailer and started moving. We’ve lived in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Kansas, and here. I think that’s all.”

“That’s a lot.”

She nodded.

“Do you like moving around? It sounds like a great adventure, like being a pioneer.”

“It’s okay.” She shrugged her shoulders again.

“Kind of lonely sometimes?” I put my hand on her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she repeated.

“Well, I’m glad you came west this time. You really are a great helper with the horses.”

She smiled at me then, a smile to melt your heart, so hopeful and open. I hadn’t seen her look like that before.

“Maybe me and Daddy could stay for the winter,” she said. “I could help you with the horses, and Daddy can do whatever else needs to be done.”

“I don’t know,” I said, sorry to disappoint that hopeful little face. “Boyd doesn’t keep a lot of workers over the winter.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders slumped.

“But maybe you can come back next summer.”

“Maybe,” she said softly. “But probably not. We never go the same place twice.”

She patted Buck’s nose again, then kissed it.

“I better go,” she said. “I still have to do my lessons. Thanks for letting me come.”

“Thank you for helping.” I smiled, watching her sprint for the door.

“Jenny?”

She turned at the doorway to look at me.

“You really are a great helper.”

She smiled and ran toward the trailer she shared with her dad.

A
fter Emma moved in, we didn’t eat at the diner nearly so often. Emma liked to cook, she said, and she actually was pretty good at it. Maybe not as good as Cara, but a whole lot better than Ami or Trish. Poor Trish caught a pan on fire once, and all she was doing was trying to boil some green beans. She left not long after that. Daddy said probably she was just embarrassed about it. I think maybe she left because I laughed at her. But honest to God, she was funny, grabbing the pan with a towel wrapped around her hand, jumping from one foot to the other, and screaming at me to open the door.

She got kind of snappy with me about it when I laughed, until Daddy told her to shut the hell up. I knew then that she would leave soon. I was eight when Trish lived with us, old enough to know that no one stayed around except Daddy.

On a Tuesday morning in early August, Emma swept into the trailer holding a plastic grocery bag triumphantly above her head.

“Hey, you!” She smiled at me, her green eyes sparkling bright. “Guess what I’ve got.”

“Books?” Emma brought me a regular supply of books from the library.

“Nope.” She opened the bag and pulled out a package of bacon, almost full. Grinning, she set it on the table and reached into the bag again. Half a dozen eggs, an unopened quart of milk, and a carton of orange juice were deposited next to the bacon.

“The Andersons left just now, and they gave me the stuff out of their fridge. So I’m thinking we’ll have breakfast for dinner tonight. How does that sound?”

“Great!” I loved bacon and eggs. We didn’t have bacon often. It cost too much and Daddy said it wasn’t very healthy. Mostly we had cereal for breakfast.

“I thought the Andersons were staying till Friday,” I said.

Celia Anderson was a year younger than me, and we’d had fun in the week she’d been at the campground. Her mother took us on the lift up the ski hill once. She even paid for me to go. You could see forever from up there. Celia was afraid on the lift, but I loved it. It was almost like being in heaven.

“They’re heading out below,” Emma said, using the local term for leaving the valley. She stuffed the groceries into our tiny fridge. “They wanted to get out ahead of the storm.”

We’d been watching the weather on television all morning. A front was building to our west, and we were supposed to get a gully washer—that’s what the weatherman called it.

“The Dixons are leaving, too,” Emma said. She turned to me and I guess I looked nervous, because she sat down across the table from me, took my hands in hers, and said, “We’re going to be fine, honey. Don’t you worry.”

“But if we’re fine, why is everyone leaving?”

“Not everyone,” she said. “Just the Andersons and the Dixons. They’re from places where storms mean tornadoes, I guess. But we don’t get tornadoes in Idaho. I told them, Boyd told them, even Zella Fay told them it would be okay. But they left anyway.”

I sighed. I would miss Celia.

“How are your lessons going?” Emma turned my math book toward her and frowned at the page. “Are these fractions?”

“Yeah.”

I’d been plowing through the book all week. When I finished it, Daddy said he would take me to see a movie at the Spud—that was the drive-in theater in Driggs. It had a huge concrete potato on the back of a truck out front. On weekends they played double features, the movie dialogue interrupted regularly by someone calling out on the speakers, “So and so, your Gladys burger is ready.” Daddy made me a bet at the start of summer that I wouldn’t ever make it through both movies without falling asleep. We’d been twice so far, and both times I was asleep long before the second movie had even started.

“This stuff would make me cross-eyed,” Emma said. “I couldn’t help you if I tried.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “Once you get used to it, it goes pretty fast.”

She shook her head.

“You’re going to college someday,” she said firmly, nodding at me. “I can tell already you’re going to be a college girl. You must get your smarts from your dad.”

“He didn’t go to college,” I said.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “You don’t have to go to college to be smart. But you sure as heck have to be smart to go to college.”

“Did you go to college?”

Emma laughed and rose from the table. “Me? Oh no, honey. I’m not smart enough for college. I barely made it through high school.”

“You’re smart about horses.”

She bent to kiss the top of my head. “Thank you, Jenny.”

“For what?”

“For being such a nice person.”

I felt my cheeks redden.

“I’ve got to get back to the stables,” she said, opening the door and glancing at the sky. “I need to move out anything the wind could pick up, and make sure the horses are okay. I’ll see you at lunch.”

She strode toward the stables and I returned to my math problems. Emma wasn’t worried about the storm, so I decided I wouldn’t worry, either.

By mid-afternoon the sky was a dark steel gray, and wind skittered the brush and dry grass through the campground in small whirlwinds.

Daddy came home and turned on the television while I watched the huge clouds towering in the sky out the window. Once in Texas we had seen a tornado and we didn’t have time to go anywhere safe. It missed our part of the campground, but I won’t ever forget the mess it left in its wake. Three trailers had been lifted right off the ground and thrown into a field nearby. Another lay on its side. Daddy helped a man climb out of that one. The firemen and police had to help some other people. No one died that day, but I always worried about bad weather after that.

“Should we go to Zella Fay’s? She has a basement.”

“Hmmm,” he said, staring at the television.

“Hey, you guys!” Emma struggled to close the metal door behind her. Outside, the wind howled a long, low lament. “What are you doing sitting inside watching television, when Mother Nature is putting on such a great show out there?”

Daddy raised his eyebrows at her, frowning slightly. “When you live in a trailer, babe, Mother Nature’s shows aren’t always so great.”

“We’ll be fine,” she said, dropping beside him on the bench by the table. “We don’t get tornadoes in Idaho.”

“Straight-line winds can be just as bad,” Daddy said.

“Come on.” Emma rose and pulled him up by his hands. “You have to see this.”

We followed her outside and walked to the edge of the campground. In the distance, huge thunderheads rolled toward us. We could see the dark of the rain sweeping across the valley. Lightning arced across the sky to the ground, flashing again and again. It was beautiful in a terrifying kind of way. I held on to Daddy’s hand tightly.

When the rain finally reached us, we ran back into the trailer. Heavy drops began rapping against the roof, not so bad at first, then louder and harder.

“Oh my Lord, it’s so loud!” Emma gazed at the roof, her hands covering her ears. “I guess I’ve never been inside one of these when it rained.”

She took Daddy’s hand and grinned. “Come on. Let’s go to Zella Fay’s. We can have some pie and watch the storm without all this noise.”

We covered our heads with our jackets and ran through the downpour to the diner, where a half-dozen other campers sat drinking coffee and watching the storm outside.

“Pie?” Zella Fay filled two mugs with coffee and poured a glass of milk for me.

“Sure,” Daddy said. “Jenny, do you want some pie?”

I shook my head, staring out the window at the storm. Daddy put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me tight. “We’re okay, Jenny. We’re just fine here. We’re safe.”

Zella Fay brought apple pie slices for Daddy and Emma and a couple of chocolate chip cookies for me. After a while, the wind stopped howling so loud and the deluge settled into a steady, hard rain.

“Come on,” Emma said, rising from the table and holding out her hand to me. “Let’s go see the gully washer.”

Daddy smiled at her and rose, too. I took Emma’s hand and followed her out into the rain, across the muddy parking lot and past our trailer.

“Where are we going?” I shouted, my voice muffled by the heavy rain.

“You’ll see!” She led us up a slight hill, pulling me along by the hand. At the top, she stopped and pointed down into the ravine below. A small but vicious river whooshed through the little valley, a river that hadn’t been there before now.

I stared at the rushing water and then at Emma.

“That’s what they mean by a gully washer,” she said, grinning. “The ground is too dry to soak in all the water, so it washes down the valleys like that.”

“Cool!” I watched the river in awe.

“Yep, it’s pretty cool,” Emma agreed. “But it’s dangerous, too. Look how fast that water is moving. You could get swept away in water like that.”

I held her hand tightly and backed away from the edge of the rise where we stood.

“You’re okay,” she said. “I’ve got you.”

A flash of lightning tore the sky open and I jumped. A few seconds later, thunder rumbled loud across the valley.

“Come on,” Daddy yelled, pulling Emma’s hand. “We’d better go back in.”

We slogged back across the campground toward the diner, shielding our faces from the driving rain.

“You all look like drowned rats.” Zella Fay shook her head as we entered. “Take those jackets off and drink something warm.”

She poured more coffee for Daddy and Emma and brought me a steaming cup of cocoa with marshmallows.

“You’ve got to watch out for this one,” she said to Daddy, nodding toward Emma. “She’s got no more sense than the Good Lord gave a mule. Last summer, she almost got herself hit by lightning, out dancing in the rain.”

Zella Fay shook her head and glared at Emma.

“But it was fun!” Emma smiled at her, then at me. “Besides, I had to make sure Jenny got to see a gully washer.”

Zella Fay returned to the kitchen, muttering under her breath about damned fools.

“Did you really dance in the rain?” I asked, poking the marshmallows down into my cocoa and watching them bob back up to the surface.

“Sure I did,” she said. “I like dancing in the rain. Haven’t you ever done that?”

I shook my head. I hated rainstorms, the way the rain pounded so loud on the roof of the trailer and the wind shook the walls like paper.

“Well, come on then!” She rose again, laughing.

“I don’t think so.” Daddy shook his head. “Too much lightning out there.”

“Come on,” she teased. “You’re not going to let a little lightning keep you inside, are you?”

Daddy shook his head again, so she turned to me. “How about you then, Jenny? Don’t you want to go dance in the rain?”

I wanted to go with her, but I sat frozen in my chair, feeling my cheeks redden. Emma wasn’t afraid of anything, it seemed. And I . . . well, I was afraid of just about everything.

“Jenny is
not
going out there until it stops storming,” Daddy said firmly.

Emma tilted her head so that her red curls fell across her face. She pouted for a moment, then laughed again and sat back down beside Daddy.

Later that evening, after the lightning and thunder had crossed over the mountains, we did go outside and dance in the lingering rain, Emma peeling off her jacket and whirling across the grass. Even Daddy came out and danced. So did some other people who’d waited out the storm in the diner. By the time we were done, we were soaked all the way through our clothes, all the way to the bone. My teeth chattered as I spun around, holding hands with Daddy and Emma.

I can’t remember a better day in all my life.