Summer Winds (10 page)

I roamed amid festival performers, mimes with miniature horses, toy twisters who could turn tubular balloons into giraffes, and rows of merchandise tents touting everything from baked-bean wind blockers to corncob door knockers.

Twenty minutes later I finally located Cash, at the far end of chaos, having a beer with Donnetta and talking up a storm. Their conversation died out as I approached.

“Where have you been? I was looking all over for you.”

“Giving you some space to talk to Stretch.” I could tell she’d had more than a single beer.

“Thanks, but I’ll let you know when I need space.” My sarcasm surprised even me.

“Well, there you go,” Donnetta said, toasting Cash and behaving a little tipsy herself. Cash grinned at her and the two of them seemed to be sharing some barroom secret I wasn’t privy to.

“I just don’t want you to get lured off into the woods by one of these drunken fools, that’s all,” I said, to regain my composure.

“Hell, she’s so ugly if they took her they’d bring her back come daylight.” Donnetta hee-hawed and Cash laughed.

“Glad you two are having such a high time,” I said.

“Hey, Missy, have a beer and lighten up.” Donnetta handed me a beer and popped the top while it was in my hand. I hated beer, but it was cold and I drank it anyway.

A voice over the loud speaker announced the beginning of the games, drowning out any further conversation. Cash left without comment when the announcer demanded the ropes-course entrants line up by the riverbank.

I glanced over to see several rope configurations spanning the narrowest part of the river. Thick hemp rigged to trees and poles with pulleys and other crazy-man equipment designed to get people killed or at least dunked. My neighbor Jonas Wiley, whose son had to be hauled out of the city sewer, was already clinging to a rope and struggling to catch the flopping end between his knees as the pulley swung him out over the river. He seemed determined to create another water crisis for his family. Midway across, his shorts bagged and his white briefs flapped behind him like a napkin just before he lost his grip and splashed into the water amid whoops and laughter. His fall nearly capsized the raft filled with drunken judges who floated beneath the ropes and gawked at everyone’s undies while pretending to rate their rope handling.

“How you doin’, Ms. Stanwyck?” Donnetta shouted, sucking on a long-neck bottle and gauging my temperament.

“Fine.” I searched for Cash again.

“She’s right over there.” Donnetta pointed, seeming to know the topic I was most interested in, without my bringing it up. “A strange one, I’ll grant you that. And not in a very happy mood tonight.

Maybe I was wrong about you getting her out for an evening.”

“No, you were right. She’s just a little high-strung, that’s all.”

“Riding high-strung horses is a dangerous deal.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked, scanning the riverbank.

“Means I’m drunk.” She took another long swig of her beer.

A man swung over the water and lost his grip, his hands skidding across the rope, obviously burning them, since he let go, yelping, and fell into the muddy water. The next figure, tall and muscled and wearing black jeans and a checkered red shirt, was obviously Cash clinging to the rope and moving across the river easily. Crossing once without incident, she pushed off from the opposite bank and traveled back, jumping to the ground near us as people applauded.

She ambled over, brushing her hands off on her jeans.

“Nicely done, cowgirl!” Donnetta toasted her with her Bud Light. “How’d you learn to do that?”

“I haven’t found anything I couldn’t hang onto once I wrap my legs around it.” She looked right at me before she swaggered off, and a twinge shot through my groin.

“Well now, did you hear that?” Donnetta blew an appreciative whistle across the lip of her beer bottle. “I’d say Ms. Cash might be more like Johnny than June.”

I ignored Donnetta’s remark as the voice over the microphone summoned Cash Tate to pick up her first prize of a hundred-dollar gift certificate to Benegan’s Dry Goods store. Feigning interest in a booth in the distance, I moved away from Donnetta’s probing eyes and quickly spotted Cash, hurried over, and put my hand on hers.

“Congratulations!” I beamed as she jammed the gift certificate into her back pocket and stopped to buy another beer. A rope dangled from her neck bearing a cardboard medal with the words 1st Place Winner Knows the Ropes. “Look, Stretch had no idea he was interrupting our conversation.” When she didn’t say any more, my tone shifted from slightly conciliatory to brusque, and I instinctively whirled, much like I always did with my mare, saying over my shoulder, “Had enough? You ready to go?” She hurried to catch up with me, dancing past me and turning to face me while jogging backward. She stopped, forcing me to stop, and took the rope trophy from around her neck, put it around mine, and gazed at me with her soft eyes.

“I want to go back to that spot by the cart path where the tree is and sit down on the ground and lounge up against that big oak and listen to the music, and I don’t want anyone to interfere with that. You said learn to ask for what I want. I want that.”

“Okay,” I whispered, and she took my hand and my mind chanted a litany of questions: What will people think when they see her holding my hand? Why do I care? Why am I unwilling to pull my hand away? And all the while she was leading me there, to that spot below the embankment where we sat down and sank back against the rough bark, and when our arms touched I closed my eyes and let the wind carry me above the sound of my beating heart. At that moment, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t want to know.

I just wanted to feel something, something I had never felt before, and if it could last only a few minutes on this riverbank, I would take it.

We drove home silent in the darkness, looking out the truck window at the stars, and I didn’t know what to make of any of it. How could it be that between six thirty and midnight, Cash Tate had turned into someone else for me, evoking feelings I didn’t know I was capable of possessing? Maybe I was just waking up again, and these sensations were all natural. Maybe I’d start dating again, get married, come out of my shell. I’d heard stories like that, hadn’t I, where people helped others find themselves?

I hated for the night to end. Would there ever be another night like this one? And I worried about why I was wondering any of this.

After pulling into the driveway, I put the truck in park. We both sat for a moment. She flexed her fingers on the legs of her jeans as if she wanted to say something, grasp something.

“Sooo.” She drew out the word and let it linger in the air, offering me the chance to fill in life’s blanks, allowing me to take this moment in any direction I might choose. Despite the internal warmth, I was, at the core, a practical woman, and I knew the consequences of intimacy—too much sharing or too much frivolity brought about loss of control and lack of respect. So I changed my tone and became energetic.

“Sooo,” I imitated her word and tone, “it was fun. I’m glad I’ve gotten to know you better. Donnetta was right. I may have sold you short. Well, just a little short. You’re still pretty green.”

“Guess so.” Her voice was soft.

“What are you going to buy with your gift certificate? May I suggest boots?”

“Boots it is. No pointy toes or slick bottoms.” She mimicked my remark about her line-dancing gear. “We’ll go shopping then?” she asked, and I nodded.

Before I could respond, she grabbed the door handle and nearly blasted out of the truck and into the house. By the time I got inside she was in her room.

❖

The next morning Perry was on the front porch with his battered hat in hand, ducking his head and trying to communicate something.

“I gave some thought to what you said and it’s okay.”

“What’s okay?” I frowned at his inability to come to the point.

“We can cut my space in half. She can bunk out there with me.”

I guided him off the front porch and farther away, out of hearing distance of the house. “That’s very nice, Perry, but I’ve rethought it and I don’t believe it’s the right thing to do. She needs to stay here.”

“Naw, that’s crazy. She’s a worker and she has every right to the bunkhouse.”

“No need. It’s all fine. She’ll stay here.”

“Look, it’s your place and if you—”

“Perry, I don’t
want
her to leave the house.”

“You don’t?” His face puzzled up.

“No. I want her here.” I bit the corner of my lip.

“Any particular reason, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I like her company.”

He paused. “I was kind of thinking that. Well, all right then.”

He wandered back to the bunkhouse scratching his head.

Cash came into the living room clad only in a man’s shirt worn like a nightshirt. I stared at her. She looked raw and stunning, like a big African cat, and she seemed unconcerned that she had on no makeup or pressed clothing or anything else, including pants, beyond her underwear.

“You okay? I heard someone.”

“Just Perry. Did you drink too much?” I referenced our evening and desperately wanted the emotions to be tied to excessive alcohol versus anything more serious.

“I might have.”

“I would say you did. My daddy always said about drinking, ‘Better to deal with your nightmares while it’s daylight, than drown your dreams at night.’”

“Your daddy was a smart man. Is he still alive?”

“Both my parents died from carbon monoxide, a freak accident with the heating system when I was a teenager. I was staying overnight with a cousin so I came home to everybody gone.”

She looked at me strangely, as if she thought my youth was somehow easier than her own and now realized everyone had baggage. “Any sisters or brothers?”

“None.”

“So you married young to have someone?”

“Maybe. Do you think about marriage and children?” My question hung in the air.

“I do. I think it sounds horrible.” She laughed. “Families don’t work out too well, in my experience.” She flopped back down onto an overstuffed chair.

“It doesn’t have to be the way Buck did it, Cash, you know that. And you don’t want to go through life alone. You’ll meet someone.”

“You’re alone.”

“Well, there’s your lesson. Don’t grow old on the prairie with a crotchety old man and a moody mare,” I said.

Her eyes sparkled at me. “Does anyone ever get close enough to really know you, Maggie Tanner?” She asked it suddenly and I knew that if anyone could get close, it might be this tenacious young woman. I cocked an eyebrow and simply locked eyes with her, visually challenging her audacity. “If you’ll tell me all your nightmares, I’ll tell you mine.”

“One of these nights, maybe. When I’ve had too much to drink,” I said.

“I’ll make that my goal.” She stood there for a moment just taking me in, then seemed to jolt herself out of her thoughts. “If you’ve got some time today, could we go get the ‘appropriate foot gear’?”

“Get yourself together and let’s go now.” I was more spontaneous than I could ever remember. Cash sprang to her feet and was ready in five minutes.

Like kids ditching school, we rolled down the road in my old Chevy truck, laughing and talking about last night’s festival: how pretty Sara Goodie looked and how her husband didn’t seem to appreciate what he had, how Jonas Wiley’s underwear hung so far off him that you could see the hair on his butt, which made Cash bless poor Mrs. Wiley.

“The judges were all drunk,” I exclaimed.

“Yeah, when I was sailing overhead, I looked down and the old gray-haired guy had his pants unzipped and was peeing into the river right while he was judging me.”

“And let’s face it, you were judging him.” I giggled.

“I gave him a four on a drunk’s scale of ten: two for having a dick and two for being able to find it. Six-point penalty for size.”

We were, as Bea Benegan would have phrased it, “in stitches” by the time we pulled up and parked in front of her dry-goods store and stumbled in to look for boots. Bea took one look at us and seemed to get stiffer still, worried no doubt that our hilarity meant we’d come straight from the festival, having drunk our breakfast.

Cash forked over the folded-up gift certificate, and Bea set about helping her locate the right boots.

“Work, field, hunt, or riding?” She rattled off boot categories as she stood beneath a stuffed moose head, its tongue dangling as if exhausted from busting through the store wall.

“How about a pair of crepe-sole Justins?” I suggested.

Bea registered shock, then whispered, “Wonderful boots, Maggie, but those are higher than a cat’s back. Run around four hundred dollars.”

“Got any on sale?” Cash asked, unperturbed.

Bea led us over to a stack of boxes that looked a bit dusty and battered, and Cash knelt to read the sizes in the dim light. “Got anything in a 10B?”

“Big foot,” Bea exclaimed.

“You calling me a Prairie Yeti?” Bea looked embarrassed and busied herself rummaging around for a pair of boots that would fit Cash. Amid the boot rubble, Cash located a pair. “How much are these?”

“They’re green,” I said to Cash, as if she’d gone inexplicably color blind and had her taste hijacked.

“That’s why they’re on sale,” Bea whispered.

“You’re kidding.” Cash insisted on trying to prod Bea into good humor as she tried on the boots. “I’d think boots this color would be so rare you’d charge double.”

“You couldn’t pay someone to be buried in that color boot,” I said. “And they’re real comfortable.” Cash grinned. “You said the right boots, Maggie. You didn’t say they had to be a particular color.”

“They’re Justins marked down to one hundred and fifty,” Bea said, tilting her glasses to read the slashed price.

“You can put the remainder on my charge,” I said.

“Treat your workers awful nice,” Bea said sweetly. “Most ranchers around here are tighter than Dick’s hatband.”

“I’m paying for them.” Cash wrestled some bills out of her pocket.

“You can work it off,” I said quietly.