As soon as the announcer’s voice woke Joe, he knew he was screwed. He’d promised to help Violet this morning, and one glance at the clock told him he’d slept through most of the slack. He dragged on the first clothes he found and bailed out of the truck. Violet was nowhere in sight, but Beni was slouched on a bench outside the rodeo office, looking like an abandoned puppy.
Joe hesitated. He was a total novice when it came to kids, and this one struck him as advanced-class material, but he couldn’t just walk past without saying anything. “What’s the problem, big guy?”
Beni rolled his eyes up to give Joe a sullen look. “Grandma’s too busy to get me a snack.”
Joe glanced into the office. Iris was tapping at the keys of her laptop, a cell phone stuck to her ear and a frown on her face.
“Where’s your mom?” Joe asked, like he was only trying to be helpful and not desperate to see her.
“Sorting steers because the gate man is drunk.”
Crap. That didn’t sound good. Iris hung up the phone, muttering something under her breath that wasn’t appropriate Sunday morning talk. Her eyes lit up when she spotted Joe.
“Could you watch Beni while I find Cole? Steve’s got…well, he’s not feeling so hot, and now next week’s committee wants to add a rookie bareback riding event, and I can’t give them an answer.”
“Uh—”
“Thank you.” She shut and locked the office door, hustling away before he had a chance to utter a complete word.
Joe looked at Beni. Beni looked back, equally skeptical about the arrangement. Then he heaved another sigh. “I’m still hungry.”
Oh hell. He could at least buy the kid a snack. Come to think of it, he was starving, too. “We can grab something at the concession stand. What do you want?”
Beni perked up. “A Snickers.”
“How ‘bout a pancake?” Joe countered.
“I already had one of those.” His eyes narrowed, wheels spinning in his head. The word conniving crossed Joe’s mind, but geez, the kid was five. “Maybe some popcorn?”
Well, it wasn’t candy, and it was made of corn, which made it a vegetable. That was good, right? They went to the nearest concession stand, got a bag of popcorn for Beni and a burger for Joe, and brought it back to the bench in front of the rodeo office. Beni munched happily. Joe swallowed his burger in three bites and fidgeted, impatient. If Iris would come back and cut him loose, he could at least help pen and sort the stock for the performance.
“Grandma said you and my mommy went on a date,” Beni said.
Joe snapped to attention. Oh hell. What was he supposed to say? “Uh…yeah.”
“And you stayed out real late. That’s why Mommy’s cranky today.”
“I…guess?” Joe winced at the pathetic reply. Geezus. He really sucked at this.
Beni’s eyebrows scrunched in accusation. “You better not’ve tried any funny business.”
Joe made a sound halfway between a choke and a laugh. He was tempted to ask what a five-year-old knew about funny business, but he was afraid of the answer. And the follow-up questions. He met Beni’s gaze, keeping his own steady and somber. “No funny business.”
Beni did a classic Eastwood squint, a half-pint badass. Joe didn’t flinch. This, he realized suddenly. This was the reason he’d had to walk away from Violet last night. So he could look her son in the eye this morning and not blink. Not lie. It was worth every aching, miserable minute since. For the first time in very long time, Joe felt…clean.
Or at least cleaner.
Beni gave him a half-nod, then slouched against the wall and shoveled in a fistful of popcorn. “Got anything good on your phone?” he mumbled through a full mouth.
“Huh?”
“Games and stuff. I get in trouble when I’m bored.”
It sounded like a threat. Having seen Beni in action, Joe was prepared to take it seriously. He pulled out his phone and handed it over. “We can download something from the app store.”
“Cool.” In less time than it took Joe to pull up a number on speed dial, Beni found what he wanted and handed the phone back to Joe. Zombies vs. Aliens. “Your mom lets you play this?”
“She never said I couldn’t.”
Which was pretty much what Joe had told Violet after asking her dad if they could date. Nice try, kid. Joe tried a different tack, opening a browser and pulling up a site Wyatt had found that showed all of the wind currents rippling and eddying across the United States. The effect was mesmerizing, and would hopefully distract Beni long enough for his grandmother to get back.
“Here. Check this out.”
As Beni took the phone, Joe glanced up and saw Violet watching them. Hair straggled out of her ponytail, stuck to the sweat on her neck, and her face was flushed, a streak of dirt across one cheek and a smear of calf shit on one thigh. She stared at him as if he was holding Beni at gunpoint, then her expression went weird, sort of queasy, like she’d been punched in the stomach. Her gaze slid, fixed on Beni, and her eyes narrowed.
“Where did you get that?” She stalked over and snatched the nearly empty bag of popcorn out of Beni’s hand.
“He gave it to me,” Beni whined, like Joe had forced him to take it.
Joe froze like a jackrabbit caught out in the open desert. If he kept still enough, she might find another target.
Violet crushed the bag into a ball and slam-dunked it with enough force to rock the aluminum trash can. “Did I not say you couldn’t have any more today? Are you trying to make yourself sick?”
Beni ducked his head and pushed out his bottom lip. “I was hungry.”
“Because you didn’t eat your breakfast, which is why I told you no more snacks until lunch.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I didn’t know—”
Violet nailed him to the bench with a disgusted glare. “That’s why he hit you up. You’re the only one he could con.”
Perfect. First he’d been a no-show for the slack, then he’d been played by a preschooler.
Violet grabbed Beni’s hand and hauled him off the bench. “You’re going to the trailer, mister.” As she dragged him away, she looked over her shoulder at Joe. “And you…stay right there.”
Any man who’d ever had a mother knew that tone of voice. Joe stayed. Iris came back, her gaze falling on the empty space beside him, then rising with a question.
“Violet took him to the camper,” Joe said.
“Then the slack must be over. Thank God.” She gave him a weary smile and went on inside.
Contestants came and went, glancing curiously at Joe, some lingering to chat with Iris. Hank wandered back from wherever he’d spent the night and made himself comfortable, flirting with a couple of barrel racers while they checked the time sheets from the slack. Cole wandered in with his dog and they kicked back in the corner to share a sandwich. When Violet reappeared, Joe got up to meet her out of earshot of the crowd. She led him around the back side of the building.
“Is Beni okay?” he asked.
“Fine, until all that popcorn starts coming out the other end.”
“Oh.” Shit. Literally. Joe took off his hat, scooped his fingers over his head, then frowned when there was no hair to push out of his face. “Listen, Violet—”
She gave a quick, hard shake of her head. “Beni’s a pro. Everybody falls for his song and dance somewhere along the line.”
Joe rolled the brim of his hat in his hands, unease skittering up his spine at her stony face. Not just angry. Closed. Distant. “I should have been here to help this morning. I’m sorry. I slept right through my alarm.”
“We hired you to fight bulls, not push roping calves.”
“Well yeah, but I promised—”
She folded her arms tight across her chest, her gaze glued stubbornly to the ground between them. “We’ve managed to get by this long without you.”
Joe slapped the hat back on his head, stung by the ice in her voice. “I’ll just get out of your way, then.”
“Wait.” She reached out a hand to grab his arm, then snatched it away as if the touch burned her fingers. “We need to…talk.” She swallowed. Twice. And still her voice was husky. “I can’t do this, Joe.”
His heart stuttered. “Do what?”
“This.” She circled a hand in the air to indicate the two of them. “There’s not enough of me to go around right now. I need to tend to business.”
He stared at her, incredulous. “You’re dumping me because I slept in?”
“No! I’m not…we weren’t…” She bit her lip and averted her face. “You’re leaving next week. I’m only cutting things a little short. It’s just…it’s better this way. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take care of my kid.”
She turned on her heel and made a beeline for her trailer, those long strides sure and swift. No hesitation. No looking back. Joe could only stare after her, stunned to the verge of paralysis. The quiet clearing of a throat pulled him out of the stupor. Hank stood at the corner of the rodeo office and the look on his face said it all.
Humiliation rained down, deepening the chill settling into Joe’s bones. “You heard?”
Hank nodded toward an old swamp cooler set in the wall of the building, right next to where Joe was standing. “Sound comes right through that thing.”
Great. Once again, Violet had found a way to go public with her love life, but this time she wouldn’t be the butt of the joke.
* * *
No one was in any mood to howl and pound their chest that afternoon. Steve prowled the back of the chutes like a mountain lion with a bad tooth, taking swipes at anyone who moved too slow, and Violet was stone-faced and silent behind her sunglasses. Iris’s smile was strained around the edges. Even Hank was subdued. All of them kept a safe distance from Joe, as if he’d sprouted a mysterious rash and it might be contagious. The crew was in such a rush to load up and get gone, he barely had time to grab his bag out of the truck before it hit the highway.
When Cole was finally satisfied that he hadn’t left so much as a spare kernel of grain behind, Hank reached for the door to the front passenger seat of the pickup. One hard look from Joe had his hand dropping. “I’ll, uh, ride in back.”
For thirty minutes there was no sound in the cab except the voice of the weekly country music countdown host. Must take some powerful drugs to be that cheerful. Whatever it was, Joe needed some.
“Bull riding sucked today,” Hank said, unable to stand the silence any longer.
Cole grunted. Joe nodded. No one had made the eight-second whistle. Even the reigning Texas Circuit champion had round-assed off a belly-kicking hopper. Good thing none of them had needed help, because Joe couldn’t seem to focus, a beat late with every move. Worthless as tits on a bull.
“You okay, Joe?” Hank asked.
Except for feeling like he’d thrown himself on the ground and let Dirt Eater stomp on his guts? Yeah, he was fine and dandy. He nodded again.
Another mile passed, the hiss of the air conditioner and the thump-thump of tires over the ridges in the concrete road provided accompaniment to the number twenty-three song in the countdown, while Joe stared out the window at an endless stretch of parched grass and red dirt. He’d always loved big, empty spaces. Today the infinite stretch of prairie made him feel insignificant. Invisible. Like he could walk off into all that nothing and no one would notice until he failed to show up for the next rodeo.
“Violet was having a really bad day,” Hank said. “She probably didn’t mean it like she sounded. I bet if you bought her flowers or something—”
Joe cut him off with another hard stare.
Hank hunched his shoulders and looked out his own window. “You’re still going home next weekend?”
“Yeah.”
The last rodeo was only fifty miles northeast of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. The performances were Friday night and Saturday night. No reason Joe shouldn’t be on the first possible flight on Sunday morning. Hell, why wait until Sunday to make himself scarce? Violet had made it clear they didn’t want or need his help, so why hang around the ranch all week?
“Too bad you couldn’t stay a while,” Hank said. “I bet if you did, you and Violet could—”
“Shut up, Hank,” Cole said.
Joe smiled grimly. There really was a first time for everything. For once, Cole Jacobs had managed to say exactly the right thing.