| |
The next morning, as Jolie made the twenty-eight-mile drive from the school in Lockett back to the Circle C ranch, she thought about all that was happening, including yesterday’s encounter with the local sheriff and the obvious fact that Amanda, who had a husband and teenage kids, was nuts over him.
Jolie had to admit he had some kind of magnetism about him because he had stayed in her mind most of the night. She had awakened a few times and his green eyes and ruggedly handsome face had popped into her consciousness and made it hard for her to go back to sleep. She didn’t understand it. Attraction to a man was the last thing she needed, especially when she couldn’t remember the last time any man had caught her eye. She wasn’t even attracted to the cute cop who was a regular in the Cactus Café. He was about her age and he kept inviting her to lunch though she never agreed to a date.
This kind of thinking was ridiculous. She had too many problems. And that grim reminder took her to thinking about her future, which was just as uncertain now as it had been last week. The only thing she knew for sure was she could think of no reason to ever return to Grandee, Texas, or a life with Billy Jensen, even if he made a complete reformation. Her heart was an empty well.
Looking back, she wondered if she had ever really loved Billy, but she didn’t have to ponder why she had married him. She had been sixteen and pregnant and he had promised to take care of her and their baby forever. He had betrayed her in so many ways.
The system had sent Billy to counselors, to re-hab programs, to jail. None of it had ever worked. Billy had no discipline, no ability to stick to anything. He had never held a job for very long, never given up partying with his friends and blowing money they couldn’t afford. He had been known to spend their last dime on booze or drugs.
Jolie had learned more than she had ever wanted to know about alcoholism and drug use. With Billy’s meth use came other women—sleazy pathetic girls who were also meth users. Meth had been the last straw, a one-way trip to hell. At about the time Jolie learned about it was when she mentally accepted that her life with Billy was over. Escaping physically had taken a little more time.
She forced her thoughts to Danni who had come home from school yesterday afternoon excited about her new friends and her teacher and about fraternizing with sixth graders. She had jabbered all of last evening about her busy day, had even wanted to call her grandmother and tell her about it. With Billy having grown up in the Dallas foster system, no grandmothers existed on his side of the family. Jolie’s mother was the only person Danni knew who carried the title “grandmother.” And she was the only family member Jolie had stayed in touch with, even if remotely, over the years.
Mom had known she planned on leaving Billy, but Jolie had shared no details with her. If the woman knew nothing, she could tell nothing. Thus, last night, Jolie had kept Danni from calling her.
Jolie’s cell phone’s voice mail box wasn’t overflowing with messages from her mother, either, a reminder, as if Jolie needed one, that she and her mother were not best friends. In the past, they had gotten together at Christmas for Danni’s sake, but in the interim between seasons, they had rarely chatted on the phone, hadn’t often visited each other. Jolie had never taken her problems to her for a mother-daughter heart-to-heart. Always, she had solved her own problems as well as those of her younger sisters.
Still, Jolie sensed that the last few years, her mother had recognized the distance she had put between herself and her children and reached out. But in Jolie’s mind, it was too late. Mom had been absent in spirit and body for too long. She had worked most of her life at odd hours juggling drunks and managing blue collar bars in various locations around Dallas. She was a hard, self-centered woman who had been married four times, given birth to three children for whom she had little time, empathy or affection. She had missed every school event, no matter what it was, in which Jolie and her sisters had participated. In Jolie’s mind, a stray cat was a better mother than Evelyn Kramer had been.
Now, Jolie supposed, her frayed relationship with her mother had ended completely. She doubted Mom would ever make a trip to West Texas to visit and she couldn’t imagine herself ever going back to Grandee. At some point—she didn’t know exactly when—she had relegated her mother to a place in her heart only a few notches higher than Billy. Hell. She didn’t even know what last name her mother was using now.
As she spotted the entrance to the ranch ahead, she forced her thoughts away from the past. She was knee-deep in the future and her day had started off too well to have it de-railed.
In the Circle C kitchen, she plunged into learning more about her job. She felt safer than she had in years. The tension that had hovered in the background of everything she did was already starting to fade. So far, she liked her new life and was determined to show the Strayhorn family they hadn’t made a mistake by hiring her.
Jude had told her no one would be eating breakfast or dinner through this week, but she, her husband Brady and her father would all be present for supper every evening at seven and for Jolie not to be surprised if unexpected guests showed up. By now, Jolie had figured out that in this household, “dinner” was lunch and “supper” was dinner and they expected a full meal every evening.
The respite from having to prepare lunch for the coming few days would give Jolie the time and opportunity to get acquainted with her environment. She started with being shown the formal dining room by Irene. Jolie had never seen anything like the old long, massive oak table with its twelve leather chairs that were surely antiques. The huge iron chandelier that hung over the table looked like something she might see in a fancy restaurant and cast an amber light over the table.
A massive mahogany sideboard that stood on one wall was awe-inspiring. Columns of carved curlicues and leaves flanked its wide gold-veined mirror. Beautiful western paintings hung on the walls Jolie believed they must be originals because each one of them had those little rectangular lights hanging over them.
On the wall behind one end of the table was a large grainy black-and-white photograph of a tall man in a suit and vest and wearing a big hat, standing alongside an American Indian with a braid and a blanket folded over his shoulder. Irene didn’t know who the people in the picture were, but Jolie sensed that both images were men of importance.
Being in any part of the Circle C ranch house was like being in another world, but in the dining room, that feeling was especially prevalent.
They moved from the dining room into the kitchen and Irene showed her where to find all of the dishes and cooking utensils in the cabinets. Jolie had never seen such a well-equipped kitchen. It had almost every tool a cook might ever need. The basic food stores were kept in a hall-like pantry off the kitchen. Behind that, she found another huge room large enough to be a bedroom. She stood in the doorway, staring in wonder, realizing that this huge room had been a pantry. How many people had lived here back in the old days?
The walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves that held a little bit of everything. Irene pointed out an over-size freezer in the back corner of the room. Jolie wound her way through various pieces of furniture, boxes and piles and opened the freezer. It was filled with packages wrapped in white butcher paper, which Jolie assumed was meat. There was also an abundance of other frozen food.
Among the miscellaneous items, she found a package of frozen puff pastry dough and immediately thought of the delicious individual chicken pot pies Donna Harmon sometimes served in the Cactus Café as a lunch special. Jolie had helped make the pies herself many times when the kitchen had been shorthanded. If she had been able to produce a product fit to sell in the demanding Cactus Café, she could do it now. She pulled out the puff pastry and a chicken, telling Irene she would thaw it and cook it for supper.
Mid-morning another Mexican woman appeared. She introduced herself as the housekeeper, Lola Mendez, and made a point to say in English only slightly less broken than Irene’s that she ran the household outside the kitchen.
At lunchtime, Irene dragged a brown paper sack out of the refrigerator and began lifting out foil-wrapped packets. “You like the tamales?” She opened a foil packet.
“Are those homemade?” Jolie asked
“Si. I make. At my home. Senor Strayhorn, he love. You want?”
“For lunch? Oh, yes. I love homemade tamales.”
Irene heated the tamales in the microwave. Her husband Reuben came in and the three of them sat down at the breakfast table for lunch, struggling to communicate with each other in languages none of them fully understood.
After lunch, Irene took her to the cookhouse to meet the chuck wagon cook, Buster.
The cookhouse was a long walk from the ranch house. Jolie was no judge of distance, but she decided it must be a good half a mile. Through a storm door, they entered a long building made of wood painted white and attached to one end of a bunkhouse. They stepped into a huge dining room with windows along two sides and various ranching artifacts hanging on walls made of boards also painted white. The space was furnished with several long tables with benches, sort of like extra-long picnic tables, except that the tables and benches were highly varnished. Overall the room had a welcoming old-fashioned atmosphere. A potbellied wood stove stood in one corner of the room. The sweet aroma of cooking fruit hung in the air.
“Buster?” Irene called out.
“I’m in here,” a raspy male voice answered from an adjoining room. They found the owner of the voice in the kitchen at an island counter doing something with dough. An aroma of cooking fruit filled the air around them.
On seeing the cook, Jolie instantly thought of a character out of the movies. He had a white handlebar mustache and white wavy hair sticking out in spikes from under a ragged cowboy hat. He wore a Western shirt, jeans and boots and a white butcher’s apron. All that was missing from his costume was spurs.
Irene introduced her in Spanish, so obviously Buster spoke Spanish.
Buster wiped his hands on his apron and came toward them. He was so blow-legged he almost waddled. He put out his right hand. “Buster Wardlow, ma’am. I know the family’s glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad to be here,” Jolie said, smiling and shaking his hand. “Something sure smells good.”
“Oh, you must mean that peachy smell.” He turned toward where a Mexican woman was stirring something in a big pot on the stove. “Juanita and me’s making a few empanadas outta some fresh peaches I got at the Walmart down in Abilene a couple of days ago.”
“Oh, that sounds so good,” Jolie said. “I’ve never made those myself, but I’m familiar with them.”
“Juanita does a fine job,” Buster said. “We add a few pecans just to dress ’em up a little.”
“Hmm. Peaches and pecans. That does sound good.”
“Yep. The hands all like ’em.”
“I’ll bet,” Jolie said, looking around. All of the equipment was commercial-type, made of stainless steel. “Maybe you can teach me someday.”
“I heard Miz Jude had hired somebody,” Buster said. “This yore first day?”
“Yes. I’m getting acquainted with everything. I’m starting out by cooking just suppers this week. Jude said her father and her husband eat breakfast out here in the cookhouse.”
“Yes, ma’am, they do. J.D.’s been eatin’ breakfast with me for as long as I been the cook here. We all like havin’ him eat with us. The old man never would come out ’cept ever’ once in a while. Sometimes J.D.’d bring him out and he’d eat dinner with us.”
Jude nodded, having no clue who he meant.
“Grandpa. He die,” Irene said, as if she sensed Jolie’s confusion.
“Oh, pardon my manners,” Buster said. “Old man Strayhorn, I meant. Jeff. He passed on a year or so ago. Next, poor old Windy followed ’im. Hard thing, Windy dropping dead like he did. Him and me knowed each other a long time. Cowboyed together when we was kids.”
Jolie nodded again. She hadn’t heard much about the former cook.
“How can I help you?” Buster asked.
“I don’t know right this minute, but Jude told me to call on you if I needed to. She said you feed forty people every day.”
“Yes, ma’am, we do. Breakfast and supper. For dinner, the hands have to make do for theirselves. We do make lunches for a few of ’em to take with them. Right now, we got about forty-five who come and eat with us. The Strayhorns are real generous. They believe a belly full of good food makes a good cowhand.”
He showed her around the large kitchen, a butcher room and a cold room where sides of beef and pork hung. “Oh my gosh, you do your own butchering?”
“Yes, ma’am, we do. We feed Strayhorn beef, but we buy pork from a pig farmer down by Abilene. Chickens, we get from Lucky’s. Feedin’ two meals a day to forty-five hungry cowboys takes a lot of grub. This is where you’ll come get yore meat if it ain’t already in the freezer in the big house. You want a roast, some good steaks, maybe some pork loin and you can’t find it, just tell me and I’ll cut it for you.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Jolie said again. “That’s really something. I’d like to know how to butcher.”
“Well then. Next time I cut, I’ll let you know. If you got the time, you can come out and I’ll give you a lesson or two. Ain’t nothin’ to it. Just takes a few sharp knives.”
After they finished the tour of the cookhouse, Buster said, “Hon, I don’t know what yore experience is, but just do the best you can and don’t be nervous. Strayhorns are real long on toleratin’. You couldn’t be workin’ in a better place.”
At the moment, Jolie didn’t disagree.
Back in the ranch house, now that she knew what food items she had on hand, she sat down at the glass-topped breakfast table to plan the week’s suppers. Irene told her the family liked dessert after supper, so Jolie added desserts to her meal plans. Following that, she baked a chocolate cream pie for the coming evening meal. A long time ago, one of the cooks at the café had taught her how to make cream pies from scratch and everyone loved her pies. When she started to clean up, Irene shooed her away from the sink, communicating that it was her job to clean. Jolie felt like a real chef.
While Irene cleaned up after the pie-making and before starting on the chicken pot pies, Jolie set out to explore the huge pantry off the kitchen. On the back wall next to the freezer she spotted three shelves of old cookbooks. Besides the books in print, she found journals containing recipes handwritten in old-fashioned writing with fading ink on yellowed paper.
One in particular caught her eye. It was fancy, with a deep burgundy tooled leather cover and ornate silver corner protectors. A handwritten label on front said, “Penelope Ann’s Favorites.” And who is Penelope Ann? Probably not the hired help, considering the quality of the book. Thumbing through it, she found page after page of recipes written in nearly perfect calligraphy-like script. Some of the pages had grease spots, some had smeared ink. The recipes had obviously been used. At some point, this Penelope Ann must have enjoyed cooking.
A sense of history settled around Jolie. For the first time, she started to realize just how old this ranch and the family that employed her was. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with such deep roots. The oldest thing she possessed was her car. And she couldn’t put her hands on her birth certificate if she had to.
By the end of the week, Danni actually wanted to ride the school bus to be with the new friends she had made. Jude and Brady and Mr. Strayhorn had heaped profuse compliments on the meals Jolie had created and requested more pie. She had heard not one word from anyone in Grandee. Common sense told her this was only the lull before the storm, but she intended to make the most of it. Her spirits had never been higher.
On Saturday morning, having decided to make a pie from a recipe she found in “Penelope Ann’s Favorites,” she realized the pantry was lacking a few ingredients. She made her way to the cookhouse to see if Buster’s pantry held what she needed. When she and Buster concluded that he couldn’t help her and he wouldn’t be placing a wholesale order for another ten days, he told her to just make a list and go shopping in town at Lucky’s.
She felt confident enough to do this. Mr. Strayhorn gave her a credit card with the ranch’s name on it and the keys to one of the ranch’s pickups and away she went. Inside, she glowed at the idea that after only a week, Jude and her father put so much trust in her.
After perusing the small grocery store’s limited inventory and shopping for an hour, she had filled her cart. Since she was shopping, besides picking up the items she needed, she filled in some miscellaneous things she liked using as well as boxes of Jude’s favorite cereals. She rolled her full basket to the check-out where a blond cashier awaited her.
When she handed over the credit card, the blonde said, “Holy cow, you’re the new cook.” She came around the end of the counter and stuck out her hand. “I’m Suzanne Breedlove.” Jolie offered her hand and the blonde pumped it heartily. “Jude Strayhorn, well, Fallon now, is my best friend. I’m telling you, you couldn’t be working for a better bunch of people than the Strayhorns.”
“I feel really lucky,” Jolie said.
“Lord, you should. Do you know how many people would’ve liked to have gotten that job as cook? Jude told me you’re not married.”
Jolie hesitated. Why, she didn’t know. It would be normal for Jude, or anyone, to discuss a new hire with her best friend. “Well—”
“Separated, huh? Listen, I know how that goes. Half my girlfriends are separated or divorced. There’s a few single women in Lockett, but only a few. And even fewer single men. This isn’t a very big place, you know. But I could introduce you.”
In the course of planning her escape, Jolie had given zero thought to a future social life.
Caution surged within her. For now, she would be better off to just stay at the ranch and leave socializing for another day. “That’s nice of you, but I don’t think I’m going to have much free time. I have a ten-year-old daughter, too, and I always help her with her homework.”
Suzanne flopped her hand at her. “Oh, I know you’re busy. But everyone needs friends. Just let me know when you’re ready.” Suzanne returned to the cash register, yanked off the receipt and handed it to her. “Want me to get someone to help you load all this stuff?”
“Okay,” Jolie said. “I’d appreciate that.”
Suzanne spoke into an intercom. “Eddie, come up front. A good-looking blonde needs help loading her groceries.”
Jolie couldn’t keep from laughing.
“He’s a teenager,” Suzanne said. “We don’t see that many good-looking blondes around here.”
