Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (10 page)

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked. “I don’t think I ought to filch any more of Uncle Doyle’s wine. He usually saves it for Christmas presents.”

Harry looked startled. “Yes, umm…yes, coffee sounds good.”

As she went about preparing the coffee, getting out the cups, she sensed him behind her, his eyes on her back. And then he came up beside her, leaned on the counter. She glanced at him, saw he was looking at her as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know what.

“Did your father know?” he asked finally.

She glanced at him through a stray curl and nodded. “Oh, I’m sure of it. Mama wasn’t a person who would lie about somethin’ like that to her husband. You know how some women
might sneak a less expensive brand of coffee in on their husband by puttin’ it in the expensive can? Well, Mama wouldn’t even do that.”

He looked a little surprised, as if he had never considered that someone would do that.

“Women do stuff like that all the time,” she told him. “You know, go out when they are by themselves and buy exactly what their husband told them not to but never let on. Daddy never would tell Mama what she could or could not buy, and she never hid what she paid for anything, either.”

She saw them again, her mother and father in those last moments. “I could tell he knew it all…by the way he sat there with his head bent but still holding her hand. I’m sure Freddy knew, too. I saw it on his face, you know, the way you know somebody knows somethin’.”

He nodded.

“Charlene was stuck over by the door, cryin’. I myself had to lean close, with Charlene makin’ all that racket.”

He awoke her from the memory when he very gently tucked the stray curl behind her ear. She gazed into his sympathetic eyes, then dropped her gaze to his throat and to his chest, where it crossed her mind to lay her head.

He asked, “Why do you think your mother told, after holding the secret for so long?”

She sighed. “Well, I guess it really wasn’t a secret, was it? Daddy and Freddy both knew. Maybe Charlene, but Charlene never can keep a secret, so I think it more than likely she didn’t. She was makin’ such a fuss, she still may not know it.”

She turned from wanting to lay her head upon his chest and pushed the button on the coffeemaker.

“We haven’t talked about it. Charlene hasn’t mentioned if she knows or not.” She thought about that, then said, “I think
Mama knew that Freddy would tell me just as soon as he could after she died. She knew Daddy wouldn’t. Daddy can’t ever talk about anythin’ so intimate. He can’t even say the word
pregnant
. But Freddy…oh, he wouldn’t dare say anything as long as she was alive, because he’d have to deal with her, but no doubt he’d have been glad to tell it all when she was gone, and she didn’t want it to come to me like that. She wanted to tell me herself.”

She realized she had been staring at the floor for some moments, when a thought occurred to her. She looked intently at him.

“How did you come to be out on that road last night?”

He looked confused at her abrupt question. “I’d wrecked my car…I’d been visiting a friend, and…”

Just then the puppy started barking furiously outside. Then came the sound of him running away, barking.

“Ye gods, that could be coyotes!” Rainey cried and ran out the door.

Vaguely she heard Harry call her, but she kept on going, anxious to see to the safety of the puppy. This was as wild a country as was left anywhere in her estimation, and she’d heard numerous stories of coyote treachery.

Racing out across the yard toward the alfalfa field and fading sound of the puppy’s barking, she called, “Puppy! Here, boy!”

“Rainey!” Harry caught up to her.

“The coyotes will kill him!” Keeping going, she peered as hard as she could into the darkness toward the sound of the puppy’s barking growing ever distant. She could faintly see the corral to her left. She heard Lulu snort, heard the mare’s hooves thump the ground. She expected any moment to hear the sound of a dog fight…the puppy being set upon and torn to pieces.

“Oh, pup…come here, pup.” Then she stepped into a patch of stickers. “Ow ow! Dang…ouch…ouch!”

“Rainey?” His dark shadow appeared to her left this time.

“I’ve stepped into a bunch of stickers,” she said, trying to stand on one foot.

“Jeez, you’re out here barefooted.” His hand took hold of her arm.

“Well, I didn’t have time to get my boots. Oww…dang!”

“Here, I’ll pick you up.”

“Oh…he’s quit barkin’,” she said, divided by pain and worry. “Come here, pup!” Then, “Ouch…ooh…I hate these dang stickers.”

“If there had been dangerous coyotes out here, I suppose you were goin’ to fight them barefooted.”

She did not appreciate his tone. “You don’t need to get in a snit. Coyotes are scared of people. All I had to do was come out here yellin’.”

“You did that. Now, are you gonna let me carry you back, or are you gonna be stuck here all night?”

“I can pull them out….” She gave off several ouches and ows in between calling again for the puppy.

“He probably doesn’t know to come to a call,” he told her.

Then he stuck something in her hand. A butcher knife.

The next instant, he took hold of her arm and jerked her up and threw over his shoulder.

“I am not a bag of potatoes.”

“No, you sure aren’t. You’re more like a ton of bricks.” He stumbled and struggled for footing.

“Don’t drop me!”

“Then be still.”

Realizing she held the butcher knife, she worried that he might fall and one of them would get stabbed. She shut her mouth and hardly dared to breathe the rest of the way back to the house, where he deposited her in a chair with a very audible “Whew!”

“See if the puppy is comin’,” she told him.

He cast her a raised eyebrow. “I might have a heart attack, and you’re still worryin’ about that dog.” He was gasping for breath. “You are no feather, you know.”

She didn’t reply to that nonsense. Sometimes a good look was sufficient.

He stepped to the open door, gazed out, said, “Not yet,” and then closed the door.

She said, “It could have been a pack of wild dogs. They are worse than coyotes.”

“It might have been a skunk or racoon or a deer,” he said reasonably.

“We would have smelled a skunk. And a racoon might drown him in the creek. They do that.”

As she looked at him, tears suddenly welled up in her eyes. It was the silliest thing. She blinked, but they kept coming.

“You wanted to get rid of him,” Harry said.

“I don’t want him to get eaten up alive, or shot with a wild pack of dogs.”

He crouched in front of her and brushed her hair from her face. “It’s all right to want to keep him, Rainey.”

She brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I’ll stop in a minute. It’s just…oh, just a bunch of stuff.”

“Okay,” he said calmly.

She breathed easier when he stood and stepped backward. Bringing one of her feet across the opposite knee, she began to pull out the sandspurs. She had always hated this. Sandspurs had a sort of hook, and she tried to minimize the pain by squeezing them out.

“Here, let me do it,” he said, again crouching in front of her and brushing her hands aside. “Look over there at the sink.”

“Don’t just yank them.”

“Why?” he said and yanked one.

“Ow! Dang. They have hooks on them.”

“They do?” And he yanked another and another in quick succession. He had the sharp nodules removed from both feet practically before she could get a good breath. Two left thorn slivers embedded beneath the skin. When he would have used his pocket knife to remove them, she jerked away and said she would get a needle and do it herself.

“You didn’t want to be a surgeon, remember?”

He asked where he could find some glue.

“Glue?” She looked incredulous. “Well, there in that drawer, I think there’s a bottle of Elmer’s.”

He put a dab of glue on each sliver and told her when the dried glue was pulled away, no doubt the sliver would come, too. She looked skeptical.

As they waited for the glue to dry, there came a sound on the porch. Instantly, Rainey was hopping on one foot to the door and opening it.

“Oh!” Sinking to her knees, she gathered the panting puppy to her, crying a little again.

All Sorts of Desires

S
he decided the puppy had to stay inside, to eliminate the chance of him being killed by coyotes or running off with wild dogs. This had suddenly become a very imminent possibility to her.

Taking the rug from the back door, she put it in front of the bookshelves crowding the corner and had the puppy lie down. “That way Uncle Doyle won’t stumble over him when he gets up.”

Straightening, she looked at Harry, who stood looking at her. Shyness seemed to come over both of them.

“It’s really late,” she said, shadowed thoughts of an exciting nature flittering at the corners of her mind.

His gaze shifted away from her, and he rubbed his hand over the back of his head. “Yeah, well, I think I’ll just sleep down here…in the living room.”

Oh?
“No one can sleep on that couch.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

On the floor?
“Now, don’t be silly. There are two perfectly
good beds upstairs and a perfectly respectable four feet between them. In case you are worried.”

She felt her cheeks flush. Now that he’d said he was going to sleep downstairs, she was suddenly aware of all sorts of desires.

He shifted his gaze from hers. “I’d just as soon sleep down here. I think I’ll read for a while.”

Pulling her robe tighter around her, she said, “Well…I’ll get you some blankets.”

Upstairs, she tore the blankets and pillow from the twin bed he’d slept in the previous night, took them down and made him a pallet on the carpet, wall-to-wall and thick, fortunately.

“There, that will beat the couch, anyway,” she said, straightening.

“Thanks.” He stood in the archway, looking at her quite frankly.

They gazed at each other.

“I’m leavin’ for the Amarillo rodeo tomorrow night,” Rainey said, her mouth going dry. “You’re welcome to come with me, if you want.”

He blinked, then said intently, “Thanks. I guess I don’t know yet what I’ll be doing.”

“Suit yourself.” Disappointed that he had not leaped at the opportunity, she turned quickly, not wanting him to see her face. “Good night.”

“Good night, Rainey,” came his warm voice after her.

She paused and looked back at him. He gazed at her with an amused grin and very warm eyes. She whirled and raced up the stairs, away from him.

She jumped into the bed and pulled the covers up tight, as if to hold herself there and all together. She squeezed her eyes closed, but she couldn’t shut out the feeling of being a fool.

Oh, it was the way a woman without a man was given to thinking.

It had happened so quickly, the passion rising until it seemed to explode in full bloom between them. She supposed it had been building there all along, since she had picked him up off the highway until they were sitting looking at each other across the table in the warm light of the kitchen and the further warmth of the dandelion wine.

He was not married, but did he have a girlfriend? Someone waiting back home for him? She was annoyed with herself for not asking. On second thought, she was glad she had not asked. It would have seemed far too obvious on her part.

Why in the world had she gone and told him all that stuff about her family and, further, asked him to go to Amarillo with her? Had she totally lost her mind?

Just then she remembered the coffeemaker.
Good heavens!
They had totally forgotten to drink the coffee, and she could not recall switching the maker off.

She thought of him lying on the living room floor, where she would have to pass by, and no telling what that would look like…what he would think.

But she could not leave the coffeemaker to burn the house down, so finally, with annoyance and dread, she got out of bed and stealthily slipped down the stairs. A lamp burned in the living room. Then she saw with relief that he was asleep, with a book lying open facedown across his chest. She imagined how it had been, how he had read for all of thirty seconds, before dropping instantly to sleep. Not one minute spent ruminating about raging emotions.

She had the urge to go over and give him a good whack.

And then her gaze fell to the foot of the blankets, and she saw the puppy lying there.

The puppy and she regarded each other for long seconds, in which the puppy kept his head down but softly thumped his tail.
Two of a kind
.

Turning, she went along the beam of light from the living room, through the kitchen and to the coffeemaker, switched it off and made the house safe. Then she slipped back up the stairs, sat on the bed and rubbed her feet with lotion, soothing where the sandspurs had been.

The glue had worked very well to remove the tiny splinters. He was a clever person, she thought.

Turning out the light, she slipped beneath the covers and lay staring up into the darkness, so dark without a moon.

Her mother had been so white, lying against the white hospital sheets, and telling it all in a raspy desperate voice, and then, in the end saying, “I have loved you all with all the love I had to give.” Her voice so faint, and so amazingly happy.

She shut her eyes against it all, pushed the useless anger aside.

Her eyes popped open. She shut them again, and her mind whirled like mice chasing themselves on a wheel. Uncle Doyle and Neva…make chicken pie for tomorrow’s supper…the puppy…Charlene would not appreciate the puppy…Harry.

She had the covers as tangled as her mind and was considering going out and driving around, when she heard her mother’s voice, “Now, Rainey hon, why worry when you can pray?”

Oh, Mama, who are you to tell me any of that?

Her mother’s face, with its patient and persistent expression, seemed to stare down at her from the darkness.

The psalm came to her:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…He restoreth my soul…
. She repeated it over and over, drifting into sleep and dreaming of her mother’s hand upon her brow.