| |
Jake strolled up the sidewalk toward Maisie’s Cafe, intending to enjoy a cup of good coffee. He hadn’t run his five miles this morning and he felt a need to get his butt off his chair and move around. Preoccupied with planning the rest of his day and paying little attention to his surroundings, a second too late he became aware of the grocery store’s plate glass door swinging open. He jumped backward, but couldn’t avoid colliding with an exiting grocery cart filled with plastic sacks. He caught himself on the edge of the door to keep from falling.
In the confusion, the grocery cart escaped and rolled up the sidewalk with Eddie Moore, Lucky’s stockboy and all-around helper, chasing after it. It bumped off the sidewalk, teetered a few seconds, then turned on its side on the pavement. Its entire contents spilled onto the street.
Jake started toward the cart to help, but a blond woman rushed to his side, looking up at him and clasping his forearm. He recognized her as the new cook at the Circle C. Julie? Joey? He couldn’t remember her name exactly. She was a head shorter than he. And she did have the deepest brown eyes. But her hair was the color of straw.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you hurt?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered, too embarrassed at his exhibition of outright clumsiness to look directly at her.
Suzanne Breedlove appeared in the grocery store’s doorway. “Are you all right, sheriff? What happened?”
He felt like a fool. “I’m okay,” he answered, raising a palm.
Up the sidewalk, Eddie had righted the cart and was now picking up the sacks. Jake strode toward him, leaving the two women at Lucky’s door. “Let me give you a hand,” he said to Eddie as he squatted and began to help him.
“Oh, God, sheriff, I’m sorry,” the teenager said in a rush. “I didn’t look before I went through the door.”
“Not your fault, Eddie,” Jake told him. “I should’ve been watching where I was going.”
Now the blond woman and Suzanne were beside him helping put the last of the sacks back inside the cart. After the task was done, all of them straightened and he looked down at the woman. “You okay?” he asked her, not certain if he had crashed into her, too.
She laughed. “I’m totally okay. You and the grocery basket came out the worst.”
He managed to laugh, too, still feeling sheepish. “Yeah,” he said and thumbed back his hat. Eddie had wheeled the cart over to the bed of the white pickup truck. With its brown Circle C logo on the door, Jake recognized it as the one Windy Arbuckle had always driven. “Let me help Eddie load those groceries into your truck.” He walked over and helped Eddie lift the sacks out of the cart and into the truck bed. Eddie repeated that he was sorry.
“It’s no problem, Eddie,” Jake told him.
“Yessir,” Eddie replied, backing away. He was almost shaking.
Jake watched as the kid grabbed the cart and pushed it away from the truck bed. Eddie was obviously afraid of him. He had never meant for law-abiding people to be afraid of him, but he seemed to have that effect on teenagers. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
“Back to work,” Suzanne said to Eddie, grabbing him by the shirt sleeve.
“Thanks, y’all,” Jake said.
“You’re welcome,” Suzanne replied with a wicked grin. “I wouldn’t have missed that dido you did with the front door for anything.” She and Eddie and the empty grocery cart disappeared back into the grocery store, leaving him alone on the sidewalk with the woman. He felt unsettled and uncertain, as if he had to say something. “Shopping day at the Circle C, eh?”
Shit. That was on a par with Nice weather we’re having. But he was the first to admit he had never been an artful conversationalist with women, especially those he didn’t know.
“This is my first shopping trip for the ranch,” she said, smiling.
She had a pretty smile, but she still seemed nervous, just as nervous as the first day he met her, which continued to puzzle him. He was the one who should be nervous. And she still aroused the same curiosity he’d had about her the first day he saw her. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Maybe he just needed to get to know her better. If she was employed by the Circle C, she was now a Lockett citizen. “Before the crash, I was headed to the café to get a cup of coffee. Want to join me?”
She glanced at the truck bed and the pile of grocery sacks. “Well, I—”
“Oh, you’ve probably got groceries in there that’ll spoil.”
“No,” she said too quickly. “Actually, no, I don’t. It’s mostly stuff for the pantry.”
“You don’t have to worry about anyone in Lockett stealing the sacks,” he said. When she didn’t agree to accompany him right away, he added, “Maisie’s got awful good coffee.”
***
JOLIE HESITATED A FEW more beats. How could she say no? He was the law. If she turned down the invitation, he might think she had done something illegal. She drew a great breath to quell her stress and the scent that filled her nostrils was his aftershave. It smelled clean and woodsy and only made her more nervous. She had come in close contact with only a few men who smelled good. “Okay, sure. A cup of coffee sounds good.”
Maisie’s was only three doors away from the grocery store, so in a matter of five minute they were seated and had ordered coffee from a plump woman with frizzy hair. The lunch crowd hadn’t started to congregate. Except for a couple of men at the counter, they had the place to themselves.
“So how’s it going for you out there at the ranch?” he asked her, setting his hat on the chair seat to his right. He crossed his forearms on the table top, which made him seem even closer to her.
“So far, so good,” she answered, hoping she appeared normal but wringing her hands in her lap under the table. “I haven’t had any mishaps and the family seems pleased.”
He nodded. “You’d hear about it if they weren’t. They’re not usually ambiguous in expressing their feelings. They call the shots in the cattle and horse business in Texas, and to some degree the oil and gas business. They own the necessary politicians in Austin. Even own a few in Washington.”
The word “ambiguous” stuck in her mind. She didn’t know its meaning. She couldn’t remember ever hearing anyone say it.
The waitress re-appeared with a coffee carafe, turned over the mugs sitting upside down in front of them and poured them full of coffee. “Anything else I can getcha?”
A questioning look came at Jolie from the sheriff. Jolie looked up at the waitress. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
“We’re all right, Nola Jean,” the sheriff said.
As soon as the waitress left, Jolie glanced across the table at the sheriff who was already sipping his coffee. Of course, he drank it black. That fit the impression she had of most cops because that was what the DPS guys patrolling the Interstate did when they had come into the Cactus Café . “Uh...what does that mean exactly?”
He set down his mug. “What does what mean?”
“I...I don’t know that word you said.”
His eyes narrowed, then he cocked his head and said, “Ambiguous?” He sat back. “I should’ve used a different word. I should’ve said they’re straightforward. They don’t play games. If they don’t like something, they’ll tell you.”
“Oh.” Jolie smiled, then added both cream and sugar to her coffee. “I like that.” She sipped and said, “This really is good coffee.”
She reached for the purse she had sat on the floor beside her chair, dug into it and came out with a pen and a note pad. He watched her. His gaze was unnerving, but she always looked straight at people when she talked to them. Tilting her head to the side, she said, “What’s the word again?”
“Word?...Oh, the word. Ambiguous.” He picked up his cup and sipped again.
“I try to write down new words I hear so I can look them up later.” Then she realized she didn’t know how to spell it. She held her pen poised over the notepad. “Can you spell it?”
The sheriff chuckled. “Mind you, I haven’t spelled it in years, but here goes.” He spelled the word and she wrote it on a blank page in the notebook.
“There’s a study in the ranch house that has a whole wall of books,” she told him. “Jude said for me to feel free to use them. There must be a dictionary.” She looked up at him, feeling embarrassed by having to ask him the meaning of a word, but she still managed to smile. “I want my daughter to be smart, so I need to set an example.”
The sheriff nodded. “I see. Is your daughter a good student?”
“She is. She’s in fifth grade. She’s really excited about maybe skipping ahead. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet she can do the work. But next year, she’ll only be eleven. That seems to be too young to be in seventh grade.”
Jake smiled back at her, his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Well, it isn’t quite that simple. The kids have to be able to pass a test. And to be honest, few of them do.”
“Oh,” Jolie said, a part of her relieved. In her mind, seventh grade was a huge step for Danni. “Since she hasn’t gone to school here all year, she might not pass then.”
One of his shoulders lifted in a shrug. “If it’s any consolation, believe it or not, Lockett has a good school. I went to it myself until about ninth grade. Most of the young people who leave here fare pretty well against students from bigger and richer schools. Somehow, this little place has gotten ahold of good teachers. Your boss has a lot to do with that, I suspect.”
That bit of information was no surprise. It appeared that the Strayhorn family influenced everything in the county, maybe in the whole state of Texas.
A tiny regret stabbed Jolie. She hated to think of Danni leaving to go to college or work somewhere away from her. But she could see there was zero opportunity for young people in Lockett. “And the kids do have to leave, don’t they? I can see that. But that’s a long way off for Danni. I’m just trying to get her through one day at a time. I don’t know what the future holds for us.”
He pushed his mug aside and again folded his forearms on the table top. His eyes locked on her face. “So tell me about that. You’ve come here running away from something? Or somebody?”
Was this some kind of interrogation? Her heartbeat kicked up and her fingers tightened on her mug handle. “Not really, no.”
He still seemed to be studying her, as if he were looking inside her head and heart. Did he not believe her? As smart as he was, even if he didn’t think she was lying now, he would probably figure it out soon. “Or at least I don’t call it running away,” she added. “A lot of people might say I ran away from Grandee. But I—I call it leaving something I can’t fix and moving on.” Her hand dropped to her lap again and she felt herself clasping her hands in a right knot.
“It’s true enough that some things in life can’t be fixed,” he said. “And some things are out of your control. Sometimes the best plan is to do what you’re doing. Moving on.”
Suddenly this conversation sounded more personal than two strangers merely having a cup of coffee. Now her curiosity outweighed her nervousness. “Have you ever had something in your life that couldn’t be fixed?”
“Indirectly. Most people have. In my case it was a long time ago and I, too, moved on. Look, I want you to feel at ease. I want you to feel free to talk to me.”
“Has, uh, Amanda told you about me?”
“No details. Just said you’re changing your life.”
Jolie heard the front door open behind her and the sheriff glanced toward it. She resisted the urge to turn around, telling herself it couldn’t possibly be Billy. The sheriff lifted two fingers in greeting and she felt her shoulders sag with relief.
“Local rancher,” he said and smiled, as if he sensed her anxiety. “Small operator. Nothing like the Circle C.”
She smiled, too, and let out the breath she had suppressed. “I know it’s a big ranch. And they have so many animals. No one’s told me much about it. Amanda just said it’s huge. How big is huge?”
“Big. More than three hundred thousand acres. More than half this county. Last I heard they had four hundred sixty-nine miles under fence.”
“Sections?”
“In big ranching country, people talk about land by sections. A section is a square mile.”
Jolie felt her eyes widen as perspective dawned on her. Never had she known anyone who owned so much. “Oh, my gosh. Four hundred sixty-nine miles? That’s a lot of land, isn’t it?”
Jake chuckled. “It sure is. And when I was a boy, my cousins and I rode horses over a good part of it. So where did you grow up, Grandee?”
She didn’t want to tell him she had grown up in several little towns outside of Dallas, that her mother had dragged her and her sisters from one to the other, depending on who she happened to be dating or married to. “I was born in Terrell,” she said, in lieu of going into detail.
The sheriff signaled the waitress to bring more coffee. For a reason Jolie didn’t understand, she decided to just tell him more about herself. “My mom worked—actually, still works—as a bar tender and bar manager. We sort of moved around to wherever she could find a job that paid better than the last one.”
“Amanda did tell me your husband was abusive.”
Damn Amanda. Why would she tell him, or anyone, about her problems with Billy? Then she remembered she had never told Amanda she had divorced Billy. She swallowed. “Is, uh...is this an official conversation?”
“No. I’m trying to be your friend.”
She turned her head and stared at the floor. “Well...he didn’t beat me up if that’s what you’re getting at.”
She thought of the last fight she and Billy had had. He had been so drunk or stoned, or both. He had grabbed her arm and flung her against the refrigerator. She returned her gaze to the contents of her mug. “He just...sort of pushed me around a little sometimes.... But I was afraid it was coming to something worse.” She looked up again and into his penetrating eyes. “And that’s one of the reasons why I left.”
He sipped, then carefully placed his mug back on the table. “No matter what the feminist movement and the movies would like for us to believe, in physical strength, most women are no match for a man. Is your husband a drinker? Involved with drugs?”
What should she tell him? She looked away again and nodded.
“Did you participate?”
She shook her head. Thank God she could say that honestly. Looking back on it, she couldn’t say how she had avoided it. “Danni was born when I was seventeen. I always had her to take care of. And I always had to hold down a job.”
He continued to look at her and she felt a need to somehow defend Billy. Or maybe she was defending herself. She didn’t want Jake Strayhorn to think she had chosen a loser. “Billy wasn’t so bad in the beginning.”
The sheriff took a notebook from his shirt pocket. “Tell you what. Give me your husband’s full name.”
She felt as if a stone had dropped in her stomach, felt her eyes bulge. “Why? I don’t want him to—”
The sheriff stopped her with a lifted palm. “I won’t do anything that’ll lead him to you. I just want to know who he is, in case he shows up.”
She gave him Billy’s full name, his birth date and a physical description. The sheriff wrote in his notebook and slid it back into his shirt pocket, giving her a smile. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said.
She believed him. Even if she didn’t necessarily feel it herself, she believed that the tall, taciturn man across the table from her could make it so.
“We can talk about something else if you want to,” he said.
“Oh. Well...uh, I don’t know what to say.” As a flood of relief washed over her, she managed to smile. “You said you left here in ninth grade,” she said. “Why did you leave?”
“Family blow-up. A long story. Not worth repeating.”
“But you came back?”
“I’ve traveled over half the world since then. I consider Lockett my hometown. I lived here longer than I ever lived anywhere else. You can never forget home. I believe everybody’s got a yen to go back home and I’m no different.”
“Oh, my gosh,” she said. “If somebody asks me where my hometown is, I make up something. I wish I could feel like some place is home.”
He smiled. “If you stay around long enough, maybe you’ll feel that way about Lockett.”
