CHAPTER 25
The second piece of pie definitely lifted Mary Dell’s spirits, but no dessert in the world could mask the fact that she had some very real problems to face.
“I just don’t know how I’m going to manage without Donny,” she said as she picked up the crimped, golden-brown edge of the piecrust between her fingers and nibbled at it.
“You’ll figure it out,” Silky assured her. “You’re smarter and tougher than you give yourself credit for, honey.”
“But I don’t know the first thing about running a ranch. Well,” she said, reconsidering, “maybe I know the first thing, the basics, but not enough. Not like Donny. I never figured on being a rancher.”
“Maybe you don’t have to be,” Silky reasoned. “Maybe you can find somebody to run it for you and then you can concentrate on what you’re really good at and interested in. You hear anything from that lady at the magazine yet?”
Mary Dell popped the last crumb of piecrust into her mouth and moved her head from side to side. “No, and I’m starting to think I never will.”
“Don’t say that! Take it back, right now. Nobody ever accomplished anything by doubting themselves. Half of success is just showing up, honey, so you just keep on doing what you’ve been doing. Make your quilts, send in those patterns. You’ve got a gift, Mary Dell. A very special gift. Sooner or later, somebody is bound to realize how talented you are. Mark my words.” Silky pointed the tines of her fork at her granddaughter to underscore her point. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if, before it’s all said and done, you become a great big fat famous quilting legend.”
Mary Dell laughed, the first time she had done so in days, and started gathering up the empty plates.
“Oh, Granny. You’re sweet, but I don’t think there is such a thing as a quilting legend.”
Silky raised her eyebrows. “No? Well, if there isn’t, there ought to be. And since it’s bound to happen eventually, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be the one it happens to.”
After they cleared the table and washed the dishes, Mary Dell offered to make up the sofa bed for her, but Silky declined. “If I don’t sleep in my own bed, I don’t sleep at all. Besides, it’s probably best to leave you be. You’ve got some thinking to do.”
Mary Dell stood at the door and waved good-bye to her grandmother, taking Howard’s little arm and moving it up and down so he could wave too.
“Say bye-bye to Granny, Howard. Say we hope she comes back soon.”
Mary Dell took Howard inside and laid him down on the floor on top of his fruit salad quilt. As soon as she did, he started to cry, so she put him on her lap and read picture books to him, flipping the pages, elaborating on the illustrations, telling him that dinosaurs were extinct, mice gave birth to live babies, and that in lion families, it was the lioness who did all the important work and the daddy lion mostly lay around looking handsome, mating, and roaring real loud.
“Seems to be a lot of that kind of thing going around,” Mary Dell said to Howard, whose eyes were beginning to droop.
“Uh-oh. That wasn’t nice of me, was it? I’m sorry. I won’t say mean things about your daddy again. Being mad never helped anybody anyway, did it? No, sir. Being mad just gives you wrinkles and indigestion. We don’t want that, do we? No, we don’t. We’re going to be fine all on our own, aren’t we, Howard? We don’t need anybody else; we’ve got each other.”
After bathing and feeding the baby and tucking him into bed, Mary Dell went around the trailer to make sure all the doors and windows were locked. She had never locked the doors before, but she’d never been alone in the house at night before either. It was true that in the weeks since Howard’s birth, Donny had rarely been home when she’d gone to bed or when she rose in the morning, but she knew he always would be, and that made all the difference. The trailer wasn’t large, but suddenly it felt much too big. She opened the doors of the closets to make sure they were empty and drew the living room drapes closed, something else she didn’t normally do.
Other than the bank robbery pulled off by Bonnie and Clyde back during the Depression and occasional bouts of gunplay by jealous wives or drunken cowboys, serious crime was all but unknown in Too Much. A part of Mary Dell felt silly, tiptoeing around locking doors, peeking into closets, and listening for noises. Donny was gone, but other than that, nothing had changed. This was still her house, her town. Why should she be frightened?
Grandma Silky was right; Mary Dell had some thinking to do. In these last four days, she’d hardly moved or spoken. All her attention was turned inward; she’d been feeling but not thinking. Now she had to. She had to figure out a way to survive in a world that no longer included a husband.
She was not helpless without Donny; she’d never been helpless. Nor was she afraid of hard work. But she had relied on Donny for certain things, most of which fell into the broad theme of protection. She’d never worried about noises in the night before, or the possibility of anyone breaking in, because she knew that Donny slept lightly and was a good shot. With Donny around, she’d never worried about money either. Oh, sure, she was the one who kept track of their spending, wrote the checks, filled out the tax forms, and clipped coupons out of the grocery circular every Sunday. And she was the more frugal of the two, more averse to spending than her husband, acquisitions to her fabric stash being the only exception. But Donny was the provider and always had been.
They’d had lean years and fat years. Still, she’d always known that Donny would make sure there was food on the table and gas in the truck. Donny took care of her, of everybody—Granny, Daddy and Momma, Lydia Dale and her family—everybody. And he’d never complained about it. Well, almost never.
She wished she’d told him more often how much she appreciated that. If she had, maybe he wouldn’t have left? No. Donny hadn’t gone away because he felt unappreciated or because he minded taking care of everybody. He’d gone because he didn’t think he could do enough to take care of everybody, of Howard and of her. He’d gone because he’d finally run up against a problem he couldn’t fix. And that was the difference between them.
Mary Dell didn’t see Howard as a problem. Yes, he had some problems—what child didn’t? But that wasn’t the same as being a problem. Howard didn’t need to be fixed. Howard needed to be loved, guided, taught, provided for, and protected, as any child did. And now it was up to Mary Dell to figure out how to do it, all of it.
She poured herself a cup of cold coffee and put it in the microwave. While it was heating, she dug through the drawer where they kept the checkbooks, ledgers, receipts, and unpaid bills and pulled out anything that looked important. When the timer on the microwave rang, she carried the papers, the coffee, a pen, and a pocket calculator to the kitchen table, pushing aside a stack of books on child care to make room for everything.
For the next hour and a half, she pored over the books and bills, trying to get a handle on what they had, what they owed, and what they could expect to owe in the coming weeks and months. It was very educational—not in a good way.
Even though Mary Dell had always been the one who wrote the checks and balanced the books, she’d never really stood back to take in the big picture, to understand how (and how much) cash flowed in and out of the business in any given year. It was a lot more complicated, expensive, and precarious than she’d ever realized.
At the moment, they had $22,672.96 in the checking account. It sounded like a lot of money, and it was, but with that she had to support the entire family and pay all the bills as well as salaries for their three hired men until some more money came in the door, which wouldn’t happen until they sent the cattle to market. And if the drought were to continue, and it probably would, she’d be forced to buy more feed. She shook her head as she added up the feed bills; could they really have spent so much already this year? And how could she afford to buy even more? Especially since it was likely beef prices would drop when ranchers decided to sell off their herds rather than feed them, flooding the market. Of course, that might mean that prices would go up the following year because the supply was low, but Mary Dell’s immediate concern was figuring out how to get through this year.
Thank heaven for the sheep.
Donny always said ranchers and gamblers were next of kin. That was why he decided to raise sheep as well as cattle, as a means of hedging his bets, hoping that sheep would get them through years when beef profits were down and vice versa. As Mary Dell pored over her papers, she was glad Donny had done so. At the moment, it looked as if their sustenance and salvation lay with the sheep—if the lambing went well. And that was a big if.
A lot of things could go wrong, especially now that Donny wasn’t around. A herd as big as theirs required extra hands during lambing season, but the last thing she could afford to do right now was bring on more hired men. They had three already—Pete Samson, his cousin Ikey Truluck, and Moises Rivera. Mary Dell didn’t much care for Pete and Ikey; they were raised in Too Much and pretty shiftless, though Donny had always kept them in line. Moises was a hard worker, but he was new and had never been through a lambing season.
And, of course, there was Dutch. With Donny gone, she supposed he’d be the head man now, bless him. Mary Dell loved her father, and he loved her back, but she wasn’t blind to his faults. Even in his prime, before age, weight, and diabetes had taken their toll, Dutch was never what you could call a go-getter, and he didn’t know sheep, not like Donny did. Bottom line was, even if she were rich as Noodie and Marlena Benton, there was no one she could hire for love or money with Donny’s experience and know-how, who would work as hard or care as much about the F-Bar-T and the family as he had.
“Oh, Donny,” she whispered aloud. “How could you go off and leave me with all this?”
She felt flushed with the heat that precedes a fall of tears, but she swallowed them back. Weeping wouldn’t change anything. She needed solutions, but none came to mind.
Well, none besides tracking Donny down, roping him, hogtying him, and hauling him back to the ranch . . . Maybe that was what she’d have to do. Find him and bring him home. Not forever, not for long, but perhaps for long enough.
Donny was wrong about her being able to raise Howard better without him, wrong about so many, many things, but as wrong as he was, Mary Dell knew he hadn’t reached his decisions lightly and that she had little to no chance of getting him to change his mind.
But maybe, just maybe, if she could find him and talk sense to him, make him see that she needed him to come back to Too Much for a year, or six months, or at least through the lambing season, long enough for him to help her get a handle on how to run the ranch herself . . . she would promise that at the end of that time, he could go on his way with no recriminations or guilt . . . that she wouldn’t ask for his love or even speak the word. . .. Donny could have the trailer, and she and Howard would move into town or the big house . . . it would be strictly a business relationship . . .
Mary Dell took a last slurp of coffee, which was cold again, and sighed. It was crazy, a long shot even if she could find him. But it was the only shot she had, and she couldn’t just sit here and do nothing. Granny Silky was right. She was a momma, and mommas didn’t have the option of giving up or giving in.
Whether she’d volunteered for the job or not, she was the head of the family now.