Summer Winds (7 page)

He answered, telling me he was heading out and seeing no more patients today. I swore if he’d wait I’d be there in five minutes. Doc had a time fetish. Some said it was his Olympic medal race where he lost by one one-hundredth of a second. Others said he wasn’t even in the Olympics and concocted the whole story to mask a serious obsession with the clock. I’d never bothered to check one way or the other. He was the only doctor for miles so we had to deal with him, warts and all.

We got in the truck and I immediately floored the gas pedal and careened out of the drive, spinning my wheels as I turned the corner onto the highway. The car ahead of me was pulling a tractor and I whipped around it, giving a friendly wave to the gaping driver. Cash pushed her back against the seat as if retreating from the windshield, her foot braced on the floorboard seeking a nonexistent brake.

“Hey, no rush, the wire cut my hand, not my eyeball,” Cash said, but I didn’t slow down. Doc Flanders was so crazy he wouldn’t wait for anyone. He’d walked out while Mrs. Wiley was in labor with her twins—said they were taking too long.

Minutes later I took a tight turn and skidded into the gravel drive of the medical office. Doc Flanders was on the porch locking the door. His six-foot-six frame was bent over, a shock of white rooster-comb hair unattended for what appeared to be weeks, and his baggy pants and sloppy shirt stained beyond color recognition.

“We’re here, Doc. Five minutes,” I lied.

“Seven,” he replied sternly.

“Hey, no problem. We’ll come back another time.” Cash turned and I caught her arm, holding her in place while the doc made up his mind.

“You want to get tetanus, young lady?” Now that he knew she didn’t want treatment, it appeared he was intent on giving it to her.

Unlocking the door, he continued his dour lecture. “Not pretty, I can tell you that. Your jaw goes rigid, body convulses, eyes roll back, you foam at the mouth. Some live like that for months, entire jaw goes purple and pieces of your skin fall off.”

“I don’t recall tetanus having exactly those symptoms,” Cash whispered as Doc led us across the waiting area’s faded yellow linoleum floor and pushed open a Formica door leading to his examining room. The long wooden table was littered with used cotton balls and blood-stained gauze.

“This place is a mess, where’s Stella?” I asked of the old nurse who kept him organized.

“Vacation. She’s on vacation every day of her life as far as I can tell.” He groused about the only woman in town who would work for him and deal with his insanity. She once confided in me that he got his patients confused and she had to be there to make sure he treated the right person for the right thing. New people in town wondered why we all still went to Doc Flanders. Beyond simple geography was the plain fact that he was ours—a local character, a man who survived out here making little money and fewer friends, yet when someone was in trouble, he showed up. That was one of the measures of a person’s worth out on the prairie. When you were down, who showed up.

“What’s this?” I pushed several paper towels off the table into a wastebasket.

“Treated Bo Waters’s hunting dog awhile ago. Got tore up in some underwater barbed wire.”

He picked up a used needle next to the debris and ran water over it as if he were going to use it again.

Cash looked downright green. “You’re not using that on me.”

She drew back in the face of the contaminated needle as I reassured her under my breath that everything was fine.

“No?” Doc looked playful for the first time. “Bo’s old hound doesn’t have any communicable diseases. Probably cleaner than some of the boys you’ve dated.” He opened the fridge and took out a tiny see-through jar of liquid and acted like he was going to use the dog’s needle to extract serum, then at the last minute tossed the old syringe in the trash and took a clean package out of the drawer.

“She’s a squeamish one.” He eyed me and I shook my head, having seen this ruse before.

I reached for the vial of serum, reading the label on it to make sure he was giving her the right thing, then handed it back to him.

“You’re not allergic to anything, are you?” I asked the question Doc should have been asking.

Cash shook her head no.

He grabbed her arm and pushed up her sleeve and, before she could say anything else, jabbed the needle in roughly, then swabbed it off with an alcohol rub. “There you go.”

“Thanks, Doc, what do we owe you?” I asked.

“You owe me the courtesy of not calling me late on a Friday.

If your workers want to do something stupid to themselves, keep it within hours.” He didn’t look up and I slid a twenty-dollar bill onto the counter just before Cash and I headed out the door. As we climbed into the truck, she rooted around in her jeans pocket for money to pay me back and I refused.

“Think of it as ranchman’s comp. Your arm hurt?”

“Yeah. And you took me to a witch doctor! He treats dogs on the table where he treats patients.”

“But they’re
clean
dogs,” I joked. “Want to stop at the Dairy Queen?” I turned the truck around and headed in the opposite direction, outside town. Cash sagged back in her seat, her eyes half closed.

I pulled into a spot in front of the giant swirl of ice cream that formed the top of the building and turned off the ignition. “You stay. I’ll get it.”

“How do you know what I want?” Her brow furrowed.

“I’ll get what I think you should have.”

I bounced out of the truck and up to the window. The young boy behind the counter was Donnetta’s chubby nephew, Spiff, and he greeted me jovially.

“Coming right up,” he said as he made the cones. “That your new gal?” He nodded toward the car.

“My ranch hand.”

“Driving her around buying her dip cones. I want to work your ranch.”

“Gave everybody in town the chance but no takers,” I said to the soft teenager who wouldn’t lift a bale of hay if it were lying on top of his grandma.

“She dating anybody?” He goose-necked to get a better look into the vehicle.

“Too old for you, Spiffo.”

“I like older women.”

“I’ll let her know that, and if she’s interested I’m sure she’ll call you, but I think your cell-phone minutes are safe.”

I paid him and headed back to the truck, handing Cash her cone through the window. She was smiling now.

“I heard what he said.”

“Small gene pool constantly in search of new material.” I sat back in the seat, not starting the truck, and bit into the dark chocolate tip and down into the cold ice cream. “What?” I stopped mid-chew, seeing Cash watching me.

“Very telling about the way people eat.” Something about her made me grin all the time and I felt foolish. “You bite right into the cold center.”

I shrugged at her comment and spoke between bites. “Which means?”

“Means some guy’s missing out.” She raised a playful eyebrow and I felt my face flush.

“Then there are those who eat off their shirt.” I nodded toward the drops of ice cream hitting her shirt front.

She glanced at her chest and began to devour the dripping cone, trying to mop herself up at the same time, talking in between.

“Meaning I eat like a kid?”

“Now why would I think that?” She looked at me for a moment and a giant chunk of chocolate fell into her lap. We both giggled.

Her remark about the way I ate ice cream reminded me that she seemed to have sex on her mind all the time, but didn’t all young women. I’d missed that stage of sheer lusting. Instead I’d gone from dreaming of Prince Charming to suddenly being pursued by a guy who seemed to know, way ahead of me, that we were meant for each other. I remembered having to get used to his taste and his smells more than being attracted to them.

“You don’t talk a lot,” Cash said, crunching the remainder of her cone.

“I do if I have something to say.” I finished off my ice cream and started to put the truck in gear.

She grinned, seeming, for some mysterious reason, amused by me. She suddenly wriggled around in her seat looking for a napkin and pulled out the sack I’d brought from the dry-goods store. “Hope I didn’t squash something in here or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Actually, it’s yours.” I tried to sound casual. She looked surprised and opened the sack, extracting the soft, yellow deerskin gloves. “I wasn’t sure of the size. Don’t try them on now with your hand hurt.”

“These are beautiful.” Her tone changed to wonder as she laid them against her cheek as I had done, as if caressing the deer who gave them to her. She tried to put the right glove on but her left hand obviously stung. “Would you?” She handed me the glove. I held it open and she slid her hand in easily, but after that, she couldn’t tighten the fit, so I slipped my finger between each of hers, slowly pressing the doeskin into the curves of her hand to avoid hurting her.

As I fitted the last finger, she grasped my hand in her gloved one.

“Isn’t that the most amazing feeling ever?”

“Deerskin.” My breathing momentarily halted but my heart raced as if I were a dove trapped by kindly hands, nonetheless fearful, having no knowledge the frightening pressure signaled safety.

“How did you know my size?”

I pulled away. “Good guesser.”

“Thank you for the gloves and the tetanus shot, which now hurts worse than my palm—”

“Sorry about that.”

“—and for letting me stay with you.”

“You’ll earn your way this summer. No need to thank me.”

Talking with her made me want to run away. Yet another part of me wanted to drive her somewhere farther from the city where no one knew me and just sit like this forever. Maybe after so many years without a female friend, I yearned to be able to say what I was feeling to someone who might understand.

“What are you thinking?” she asked softly.

“That we both have work to do.” I put the truck in gear and headed back to the ranch, keeping my conversation to a minimum.

What little I said related to the things I’d like Cash to get to work on, starting with unloading the feed sacks from the back of the truck, despite her hurt hand. She’d just have to cowgirl up.

Afew days later I drove into town for what I fondly referred to as my dose of Donnetta, traipsing into the 2-K, where I slugged down a cup of her rich ground coffee.

“I don’t know how she managed it but she busted open the feed sack while unloading it, which is damned near impossible because the sacks are double lined. She didn’t notice she’d torn it until she’d strung half the sweet feed across the driveway. Then she tried to sweep it up and got dirt, gravel, and wind-blown garbage into the mix and would have put it into the feed bin and fed it to the horses, who probably would have colicked on old roofing nails, if I hadn’t noticed. Half the time she’s off barbecuing down by the pond with Perry, for God’s sake!”

“What’s wrong with Perry that he’s doing that?”

“She’s so damned charming—and damned-near useless.”

“You look more alive than I’ve seen you in years.” Donnetta ignored my lamentation as her dark eyes drilled into mine. “I haven’t seen you get this excited about anything, well, in forever.”

“What I’m excited about is that I have this, this kid—”

“She’s not really a kid, is she? Didn’t you say she was twenty-eight?”

“Acts eighteen.”

“Maybe you’re treating her like she’s eighteen, which could be the problem, as I see it.” I was drawn up short by that remark. “Boys around here say she’s a grown woman. Spiffo, anyway.”

“Spiffo would sleep with a goat and you know it.”

“It’s genetic. That’s how I ended up with Buddy, it was the beard. You ever spend time talking to her?” Donnetta pressed on.

“My recommendation here at the café-shrink is that you take a hiatus from work and go have a little fun.”

“And leave her to manage things?” My voice rose in shock.

“Go have fun with
her
. A night out. Get to know her. You probably scare the hell out of her.”

“She scares the hell out of me.” I spoke before I realized what I was saying.

“And why would that be, Ms. Stanwyck?” Donnetta’s gaze bore in on me. She was thinking something she wasn’t saying, and I was glad she wasn’t saying it because I intuitively knew I didn’t want to hear it. “Come on, what’s going on with you?”

“Too many raging hormones, I suspect.”

“Hers or yours?”

“Wish I had that problem. My hormones don’t rage any more, they just bitch.” I finished off the coffee as she slid out of the booth.

“I’ve got the perfect thing.” She scurried over to the cash-register drawer and pulled it open, scrounged around under the money, and came back with two tickets. “River Festival tomorrow night. I bet she’d like to go.” I took the tickets from her and offered to pay for them, but she held her hand up. “Hey, the pleasure’s on me.”

I drove home thinking about a night out at the River Festival.

I’d always avoided it:
a place where good old boys let off steam and
do things they’ll regret in the morning. Not worth battling mosquito
bites and half-drunk guys. I’ll give the tickets to Perry and let him
go.

As I pulled into the drive, I glanced over at the south pasture and saw Cash three feet off the ground standing on the top rail of the fence balancing herself like an acrobat.

“Oh, for the love of God,” I said out loud.
I wish I had a camera
so I could take this to Donnetta
.
What adult do I know who does this
kind of stuff? She’s a freaking kid.

I drove the truck across the open field to within shouting distance of Cash, who waggled her arms wildly to regain her balance as she saw me and flashed a quick smile. When I opened the truck door the tickets went airborne, and I managed to grab them before I got out.

“You’ll break your neck,” I called to her as the wind whistled around us and I hurried toward her to tell her to get off. The old wooden fence made of weathered logs barely supported the winter snow, much less someone her size, and furthermore I didn’t want her to break it down so that it sagged and fell, making it useless as a cattle pen.