Max laughed at something she said. Wilma loved to hear him laugh. He did it exceptionally well. It was a rousing bass that started deep down inside him and flowed through his whole body. It was as pleasant to watch as to hear. Wilma was keen on doing plenty of both.
After a little initial clumsiness that first day, Max had quickly gotten into the game. He was obviously enjoying himself.
The two were seated across from each other in the corner booth they both now considered their own. Wilma was munching on a hot pastrami sandwich and drinking a beer. Max always ordered the special. He was eating a less than healthy portion of chicken fried steak, smothered in gravy.
He had waited to order until she arrived. They had made no prior arrangement to meet. None was even suggested. But after only a few days, he’d begun to expect her.
A really good game player, Wilma knew, would have pulled the rug out from under him and not shown for a day or two, just to make him wonder.
Wilma wasn’t all that keen on playing. She liked being with him. And she was old enough to realize what a gift that was. She didn’t want to waste any opportunity to be with him by evoking any tired scheme. Besides, Max seemed impervious to scheming. Like her, he’d pretty much seen it all.
Unlike her, he didn’t seem to be able to ferret out any information about who she was. Or he wasn’t trying. That worried her a bit. They had shared few details of their personal lives beyond names. At first Wilma encouraged it to be that way. For good reason.
Wilma needed to be deliberately vague about who she was and how she lived. If he found out she was Ellen’s mother, Ellen was certain to find it out as well. And though Max might suspect she had ulterior motives, Ellen would be absolutely certain of it. And being the forthright, honest, principled woman she was, she would spill the beans immediately.
So she had hedged, eschewed and dissembled. Perhaps he’d taken his cue from her, but he never asked anything about her past or revealed much about his own. That was unusual. It was Wilma’s experience that most men talked about themselves, their possessions and their work. In that order.
Max rarely spoke of any of those things. And Wilma found it very refreshing to discuss subjects that were significantly less mundane.
“I think there has to be some kind of divine plan,” Max said as he picked up his iced tea. “Or at least I hope there is.”
His glass had made a wet ring atop the table. He carelessly wiped it away with a paper napkin.
Wilma shrugged. She wasn’t in complete disagreement, but she was a good deal more skeptical.
“There might be or there might not. What difference does it make?” she asked him.
“Oh, I guess it makes me feel safer,” he replied, thoughtfully. “The direction of a life can be turned one hundred and eighty degrees on a dime. I guess it feels better to me to believe that there is some purpose in all of it.”
He was certainly right about that.
“I’ve never given it all that much thought,” Wilma admitted. “But I’d venture to say my daughter is in perfect agreement with you.”
“Really? Tell me about her,” he said.
Wilma had never really talked about Ellen before, but it seemed safe enough to do so in a general way.
“My daughter was never like me,” she said. “I have never been quite able to get my ducks in a row. She’s had her whole life set up just so neat and tidy.”
“Do you envy that?”
Wilma shook her head. “No, I can’t say that I ever did,” she answered honestly. “And in the last few years, things for her have just gone to hell.”
Max tutted sympathetically. “Too bad,” he said. “But, sooner or later, it happens to all of us.”
“All of us?” Wilma wasn’t so sure.
“Don’t tell me that hasn’t happened to you,” he said.
Wilma shrugged. “Yeah, but I always figured that I deserved it.”
Max chuckled lightly. “You probably did!”
Wilma accepted the good humored jibe before taking another swig of her beer.
“I’ve certainly made a wrong turn or two in my time,” she told him.
Max turned more serious.
“The truth is, Wilma,” he said. “I don’t hardly think that any turn in life is particularly a wrong turn.”
Wilma eyed him skeptically. “Everything is beautiful, in its own way.” Her tone was deliberately sarcastic.
He laughed out loud at that. “Wouldn’t go that far,” he admitted. “But I do think that if life’s a road map, far too many people are trying to get on the expressway.”
Wilma smiled at him. She liked his eyes. She liked his voice. She liked his long lean frame in his Western cut suit.
“You would, I suppose, suggest a road less traveled,” she said. “I don’t think that’s original with you.”
“You’re likely right,” he said. “Not much in this world is original with me.”
She chuckled politely at his self-deprecating humor.
“I’m not saying that people should necessarily avoid the main roads,” he explained. “They just have to be aware that the expressway is still under construction, so to speak. You’re going to find detour after detour, and you may just end up running out of gas somewhere.”
Wilma considered the analogy, nodding. “Honestly, that sounds more like me than my daughter,” she said.
“Really?”
She nodded. “But I’ve always likened my life more to a game of musical chairs,” Wilma said. “I’ve been going around in circles, landing somewhere just because the music stopped and there was an open seat.”
Max looked at her thoughtfully.
“It’s a fun game,” she told him.
“I suppose so,” he seemed to agree. “But just when you’re getting comfortable,” he said. “The music starts up again.”
Wilma smiled, then nodded with resignation.
“That’s true,” she said. “It’s very true. I have to give my daughter credit. She’s always wanted security and stability. She went after it whole hog. And she still keeps that goal firmly in mind. Even if it’s further away now than ever.”
“Maybe she just needs to redefine the meanings of those words,” Max said. “I’ve had to do that a time or two.”
Wilma shook her head, disbelieving. “You impress me as a man who knows exactly what he wants and goes after it.”
Her words were true, but they were also the kind of statement designed to make most men puff up with pride and bluster into false modesty. Max was clearly not most men.
“There’s a truth to that these days,” he admitted. “But I swear I was forty years in the wilderness getting to this place.”
“Now that’s hard to believe,” Wilma said.
Max gave a little shrug. He appeared to be paying a lot of attention to the use of his steak knife. Wilma knew it was a diversion.
“So are you going to tell me?” she asked. “Or leave me to imagine that you crawled through mosquito-ridden, snake-infested jungles on your hands and knees just to get to this bar?”
He laughed again, just as she knew he would. “Are you saying this bar isn’t a mosquito-ridden, snake-infested jungle?”
“This is San Antonio,” she reminded him. “Mosquito-ridden, snake-infested are attributes more commonly associated with Houston.”
He rewarded her caustic wit with a chuckle.
“Come on, now. Confess,” she coaxed. “How did you get to be the gravy-sopping cowboy you are today?”
Max looked down into his glass and shook the ice in his tea, but didn’t hesitate to answer.
“You’ve mistaken me, ma’am,” he said in a low intimate drawl. “I’m not a cowboy. I’m a certified public accountant.”
Wilma feigned surprise. “I take it that was one of those sudden turn-on-a-dime experiences that you hoped was a divine plan.”
He nodded and then took a swallow as if girding himself to tell the tale.
“I wanted to be a cowboy, all right,” he told her. “It was my ambition from the time I was big enough to straddle a fence rail and pretend to be on horseback.”
Wilma smiled at him.
“I came by that quite honestly,” he said. “My dad was a cowboy and his dad was a cowboy and back as far as anybody could remember the men of the family had always been cowboys.”
“A fine tradition,” she pointed out.
Max raised an eyebrow. “A cowboy’s life is rough, poor and unmercifully short,” he said.
Wilma nodded. “I’ve seen all those old John Wayne movies, too,” she said.
“And it was even more complicated than the Duke ever let on,” Max said. “The days when they kept full-time ranch hands on a place was a thing of the past when I was still a child. These days a big spread might keep a manager, but the working hands are part-timers, college kids or dirt cheap day labor.”
“You couldn’t be content with that,” Wilma said.
Max didn’t argue. “Any fellow with any grit or ambition gets his own ranch and runs his own cattle,” he said. “That’s the only way to ever make it pay.”
“So why didn’t you do that?” she asked.
“I flat-footed couldn’t afford it,” Max said. “Most of the big cattle ranches came into being when land was cheap. I found out mighty quick that if I wanted my own place, I’d better be well-heeled enough to lay down a fortune for it.”
“Weren’t there loans?” Wilma asked. “Ranching is like a small business, isn’t it? You can borrow money to get started.”
“It’s a really risky small business,” Max answered. “The profit margin on ranching is so small you can barely keep up with the interest. And if beef prices go down for a couple of years…well, you’re busted.”
Wilma nodded. She’d heard enough stories and met enough fellows down on their luck to believe it.
“If you want to cowboy and you don’t inherit a place,” he said, “then you’re either a rich man playing at cattle ranching or you’re working a second job to support yourself.”
Wilma nodded. “We may have all been created equal,” she said. “But that’s the last time the field is level.”
Max swirled the last piece of his chicken fried steak into the thick white gravy.
“That was a real hard lesson for a young man,” he told her. “When you’ve dreamed and hoped and planned something for as long as you can remember and then suddenly see it completely out of reach…” His voiced trailed off and he shook his head.
“You must have been very disappointed,” Wilma said.
“Disappointed?” Max peered at her over the top of his glasses. “I wasn’t disappointed. I was mad as hell!”
His tone was inarguable. He shook his head as he recalled that time.
“I was in a fury,” he said. “All I wanted to do was curse and scream and smash my fists through things. It was my first real face-to-face encounter with the reality that life is unfair. I knew there was injustice in the world and I’d seen plenty of cause for grievance. But it had never, in my short life, directly affected me or been so irrefutable and without remedy.”
“What did you do?” Wilma asked.
“I did what angry young men always do,” he replied. “I drank too much, drove too fast and lived too wild. I was at the honky-tonks night after night, sleeping most of my days. Working only when I had to and trying not to think further ahead than my next glass of Jack.”
Wilma took a swig of her beer, noticing for the first time, that he always drank iced tea. She’d assumed it was because he was headed back to work. And that might be true. Or it could be more.
“My friends, my family,” Max continued. “They didn’t know what to make of it. I’d always been responsible, dependable. They didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it either. I wanted to be the person that I’d always been. But I could no longer see any reason to be that way. My future was going to be less than I wanted it to be. So, as far as I was concerned, it might as well be no future at all.”
“Kids do that,” Wilma said. “They don’t know where they’re going, so they just go crazy. It’s almost a stage of life.”
“It’s a stage that lots of folks never live long enough to get past. And those that do, have often wasted so much of their life that they’re playing catch up from then on.”
“Are you playing catch up?” she asked.
Max shook his head. “I was lucky, damn lucky,” he answered. “One morning my head just suddenly cleared and I saw that while owning a ranch was the thing I wanted most, it wasn’t the only thing I could do.”
“So what happened.”
“I decided I’d go into the army,” Max said.
Wilma nodded. “Lots of young men do that,” she said.
Max agreed. “Fighting was something I thought I could sink my teeth into. But as it turned out, I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“While I was waiting at the recruiter’s office I heard that if I went to A&M and got into the corps of cadets, they’d let me enlist as an officer. That sounded like a better idea than being a grunt.”
“You went to Texas A&M?”
“I’m an Aggie,” he admitted. “Just don’t start with the jokes. I’ve heard them all.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Wilma assured him.
“I liked College Station,” Max said. “And I learned two things there.”
“Only two things?”
“Two that made the difference,” he answered.
“Tell me.”
“One. I don’t ever want anything to do with any kind of military life of any kind.”
He was so adamant it made Wilma laugh.
“And the second thing you learned?”
“That I’m pretty good with numbers, especially the ones with dollar signs attached,” he said. “So after graduation, I worked around in some big companies for a couple of years and saved enough to open my own CPA firm. I’ve been doing business in a little place a few blocks south of here ever since.”
Wilma felt a surge of pride and admiration. Her heart was fluttering in the fond adulation more often found among the seriously naive. She almost wanted to applaud. She liked Max. She really liked him. He was warm and genuine, honest and honorable. Max hadn’t frittered his life away on bad luck and disappointment. He’d wrestled it to the ground and made it something of which he had much cause to be proud.
“And now, you have your place in Uvalde, your own ranch, your own cattle,” she pointed out. “Everything that you hoped for, you made happen.”
For a second, she didn’t realize that something was wrong. Even when she did sense that the atmosphere had changed, it was only that the man across from her had suddenly become less relaxed. He hadn’t moved a muscle, yet he was on full alert, wary. It wasn’t until he spoke, so softly and calmly, that she realized how absolutely up to her eyeballs she had stepped in a pile of it.
“Wilma,” he said, quietly. “I never said a word to you about my land out in Uvalde.”