Daisies in the Canyon (4 page)

“I’m making a mental list of everything I want to fix or change if this place is mine and yes, it’s butterscotch. Do you want one?” She held out her hand with one in it.

“No, thank you. I’m plenty full from dinner. Where are your two sisters?”

“I wouldn’t know where they are. Probably unpacking or filing their fingernails,” she answered.

“Sounds like you don’t like them too much.”

She removed her ski mask and with her fingertips combed blonde hair full of static back away from her face. “Don’t know if I like them or not. We are all strangers who will share quarters until one by one we get tired of this shit and leave. I don’t see either of them lasting a month.”

“That youngest one seems pretty determined.”

Her right shoulder popped up slightly. “Right now, she does. But I hear that ranchin’ is hard business.”

He bent from the waist and petted the dog. “I see you’ve made one friend.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Could be that she’d follow anyone around the ranch, not just me. Maybe she’s lonely since Ezra died.”

He rose and nodded. “I imagine so. He did love his dogs. You said that ranchin’ isn’t easy. How do you know that? Weren’t you in the army for the last decade? How would you know anything about how hard ranchin’ is? Or about life on the outside anyway?”

“Yes, I was in the army. The rest is need to know.”

Cooper chuckled. “Well, maybe someday I’ll get upgraded to that level of classification, Sergeant Malloy. Looks like you’ve got a bodyguard there whether you want one or not.”

“She wanted inside the cemetery, so I opened the gate. I expect she’ll go on back home now,” Abby said.

His arm grazed hers as he headed toward the tent pole, and there it was again. Sparks. Sizzle. Steam. It was a wonder that it didn’t create a warm fog right there beside Ezra’s grave.

He retracted the pole until it was only about four feet long and headed out of the cemetery. She looked for a truck, berating herself for letting anyone sneak up on her like that. In the war zone, it could have meant instant death. His whistling grew fainter as he disappeared behind a herd of cattle. So he liked to walk, too, did he? But wait, how did he know she was a sergeant? She looked at the patches on the sleeve of her jacket, smiled, and put the ski mask back on. If he knew that much about the army, maybe someday he would get his classification moved up a notch.

When she finished her walk, with the dog right beside her the whole way, she sat down on the porch for a few minutes but the cold began to seep in so she went on inside the house. Shiloh was in the living room, curled up on the sofa with a thick romance book in her hands. The cover picture was a half-naked cowboy, and although Abby shared her taste in books, her half sister was crazy as bat shit if she thought she could learn about ranching by reading about hunky cowboys.

Abby made a trip through the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and took out the chicken and potato salad. It wasn’t really suppertime but she’d worked up an appetite with her long walk around the ranch. She rolled off two paper towels and tucked them into her jacket pocket, picked up a paper plate, and loaded it with cold fried chicken, coleslaw, and potato salad, leaving one section empty for a piece of the chocolate cake. She stuck a plastic fork in her jacket pocket and carried all of it to her room, where she set it on the nightstand beside the bed, then pulled off her jacket and hung it in the closet.

Then she sat down in the worn harvest-gold recliner facing the window and unlaced her boots. When her toes were freed from socks and boots alike, she padded barefoot to the bathroom right next door to her room. The female soldiers she’d shared a bathroom with in her last duty post in Kuwait would have fought the war with nothing more than their bare hands to get a chance to soak in a deep, claw-footed tub like that. The shower was basic, with a white plastic curtain keeping the water off the linoleum floor. The toilet had crazed marks on the water tank, but it was clean. What had started off as a wall-hung sink now had a crude cabinet built around it: no doors, just shelving holding towels and extra rolls of toilet paper. It might not be five-star-hotel quality, but it sure as hell beat the showers in the army barracks. And the towels under the counter were big, thick, and fluffy. Evidently, Ezra had liked a few luxuries.

Abby could make do with sharing with the other two. On her way back to her room, she caught the strains of country music coming from the bedroom across the hallway. So Bonnie liked country music, did she?

She leaned against the doorjamb into her room for a minute and recognized Miranda Lambert’s voice as she and the Pistol Annies sang “Hell on Heels.” That particular CD had kept Abby awake on the long trip from South Texas. The next song, “Lemon Drop,” was one of Abby’s favorites. The lyrics said that her life was like a lemon drop and that she was sucking on the bitter to get to the sweet.

That’s the way she felt as she went into her room and realized in that moment she
was
going to unpack everything and wait until spring, when the daisies bloomed, to make a definite decision about leaving. She’d take a few months of the bitter to find out if there was a sweet middle in the lemon drop.

“Well, shit!” she exclaimed when she shut the door and remembered that she had a half bath all of her own. She went to the door and opened it to be sure she hadn’t imagined Rusty telling her that Ezra’s room came with her own private bathroom.

One of those old metal medicine cabinets with a mirror door had been hung above the sink to the left. The toilet sat right beside it with only enough room for a toilet paper hanger between it and the wall. A tall man’s knees would have hit the other wall, but she wasn’t tall, so it was fine. And it was hers and she didn’t have to share it with the other two.

She settled into the recliner and took a deep breath. The faint scent of cigarettes still lingered in the velvet, reminding her of her mother. Martha was a pack-a-day smoker right up until she died, although she never smoked in the house or the doughnut shop. But hugs with a little smoke smell in them always reminded her of her mother’s love and care.

She’d learned to eat fast, often on the run, and sometimes not even finishing what she did have before her, but that evening she forced herself to eat slowly as she looked out the window toward the south. If the gray clouds hadn’t covered the sun, she could have seen it setting.

Something her mother said one time when they were sitting on the beach at the end of the day, watching the brilliant yellows and oranges of the sunset over the water, came to her mind. It was one of the very few times that Martha Malloy had mentioned the past, and all she’d said was that as beautiful as it was, that sunset couldn’t compare to the ones in the Palo Duro Canyon. Her eyes had misted, but she’d quickly smiled and the moment had passed, though her eyes had held a haunted look the rest of that evening.

There would be lots of sunsets in the next year and Abby vowed to remember her mother every time she saw one, but right now she couldn’t focus on that or she’d start crying. It had only been two days since she’d cleared out the bank box in Galveston and tucked her important papers and her mother’s ashes in the suitcase with all her candy and snack food.

“I should have tossed them out in the Gulf. That’s where we had such good times,” she said. “But I couldn’t, not after I found that letter tucked away in the bank box when I went to store your ashes there. I’ll pick an evening when the sun is setting and the daisies are blooming to scatter the ashes. Maybe in the spring. Not on a cold day like this, and definitely not the day that Ezra was buried. I want to remember it with a smile.”

Bonnie was the only one in the kitchen when Abby carried her empty plate out to throw it away. Her youngest sister looked less hippieish in faded blue-and-black plaid pajama bottoms and a lime-green knit shirt under a shirt of red-and-yellow flannel with sleeves that had been rolled up to her elbows. Their blue eyes locked across the bar and neither of them blinked for several seconds.

Finally, Bonnie moved toward the refrigerator and said, “My eyes are like my mama’s. Yours and Shiloh’s can be like Ezra’s.”

“Abby can have that honor. I got my eyes and my dark hair from my maternal grandmother,” Shiloh said from the doorway.

Abby jumped like a little girl with her hand in the cookie jar. Twice now someone had managed to sneak up on her blind side—in the cemetery when Cooper had appeared out of nowhere, and now in the kitchen when Shiloh had done the same thing. That aggravated her more than any genetic traits from Ezra Malloy.

She gritted her teeth so hard that her jaws ached. “What difference does it make? He’s dead and we’ll never know him.”

“Did your mama ever talk about him?” Shiloh asked.

Abby removed a can of beer from the refrigerator and pulled the tab off the top. “Once, when I was a teenager and pressed her for the story.”

“My mama talked about him. She cussed him every time she got drunk and every time she got a divorce or threw a boyfriend out of the trailer. Everything from a bad hair day to a flat tire was Ezra Malloy’s fault.” Bonnie brought out ham, cheese, and mayonnaise for a sandwich as she spoke. She set a pitcher of sweet tea on the counter and frowned at Abby’s beer.

“What?” Abby raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t like the smell of beer.”

“Well, I don’t like mayonnaise, so we’re even.”

Shiloh poured a glass of milk and went straight for the dessert table. “My mama said it was best to let sleeping dogs alone. She told me that he didn’t want a daughter and gave her enough money so she could buy a small bed-and-breakfast place in Jefferson, Texas. After I graduated she sold it and went into partnership with her sister, Audrey, on a convenience store outside of Lewisville, Arkansas. I tried a few more questions, but she told me to forget the past and move on to the future.”

“So what the hell did three different women see in that man who was in the casket and why in the hell did we put daisies in there with him? I’ve never seen that done before,” Bonnie asked.

“Good questions. I have been to a couple of funerals where they laid roses on the top of the casket, but I’ve never seen daisies put inside.” Abby carried her beer back to her room, leaving the other two to bond over conversation. She felt like she had the first time she was deployed to Afghanistan. Everything was so unexplainably different there, with everyone a stranger even though they all served the same country. She dug her phone from the cargo pocket on the side of her pants and hit the speed dial for Haley. She almost wept when her friend answered on the second ring.

“Hey, what did you decide about the ranch? Are you coming home? Tell me about the foreman.” Haley asked questions until she had to stop for breath again. That was Haley to a tee. Hearing her voice put a smile on Abby’s face.

“I’m staying. Did I tell you about the daisies at the funeral?” Abby went on to tell her about it, leaving out nothing.

“Did I just hear you right? You put them in the casket with him like roses?” Haley asked.

“That’s right. Only his daughters had them. No casket piece or potted plants or wreaths around the casket. The place where they buried him is bare—it was strange. But hell, my sisters are strangers, Haley. I don’t feel any kind of love, hate, or even indifference for them. It’s like they are people I saw one time in a shopping mall.”

“Tell me your first impression of them.”

“Shiloh is kind of prissy and Bonnie is tough as nails. That much I’ve figured out so far,” Abby said.

“The foreman?” Haley asked.

“Isn’t my type, but the sheriff could be if I was going to stay here forever. Which I won’t. I have decided not to leave until spring, but after that is a day-to-day decision. I’m so confused and rattled. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“The sheriff? When did you meet him? Did you get stopped for speeding?”

“No, I did not. The sheriff was at the funeral and he came to dinner. Rusty, that’s the foreman, invited him.”

“And what does this sheriff look like and what is his name?” Haley asked.

“Looks like Travis Tritt and name is Cooper Wilson,” Abby answered.

“Oh. My. Sweet. Jesus. You are doomed. Lookin’ like your favorite singer and with a cowboy name like Cooper. You are going to grow roots right there in that canyon. I can feel it in my bones.” Haley laughed.

“Your bones have been wrong lots of times before,” Abby said.

“You’ve run from settling a long time, Abby. A year in a remote place outside of the army is just what you need to get your head on straight. And my bones are not wrong this time. Got to go. The kids are fighting over a stupid board game. Keep me posted. Open up your laptop and send pictures. I want to see what these other two women look like. And pictures of the sheriff, too. I want to see them all. Big hugs,” Haley said.

“Big hugs back to you.” Abby hit the “End” button.

Haley had married right out of high school and had two kids by the time she was twenty-five. That was her whole family—a boy and a girl—and she’d declared she was finished until two years ago, when she and her husband had been surprised with a set of twin girls. Tonight was one of those times that Abby envied her friend the family, even when the older two fought over board games.

“I’m not ready to grow roots,” she argued out loud with herself as she pushed out of the chair. “And Cooper Wilson probably has every available woman in the canyon out after him. It’s the stress of all this that had me fantasizing about him. It’s either sneak candy or let my mind wander into the gutter when I’m worried.”

A set of sheets and pillowcases had been placed on the antique four-poster bed. Had she been conceived in that bed?

She pushed the unanswered questions out of her mind and quickly stretched the sheets over the mattress, tucking in the corners and leaving no wrinkles. Then she started on the unpacking business—duffel bags first and then the suitcases.

The first thing she pulled up out of the biggest duffel bag was her CD player. Music took her to another place when she was worried or mulling over something. She set it on the chest of drawers beside her mother’s ashes, but there was no place to plug the cord in. She went looking and found that the room only had one outlet with two receptacles, and that was behind the recliner. She moved the player to the table beside the recliner and the cord was too short. She moved the recliner over six inches, then did the same with the table and it worked.