The Year Everything Changed (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-two
Elizabeth

The first tape ended just as Jessie was meeting Elizabeth’s mother, a woman, a girl, Elizabeth didn’t recognize. She’d only known her mother as an angry, bitter old woman who spouted venom whenever she talked about Jessie Reed. What had gone wrong? Why had Jessie abandoned a woman he’d fallen in love with at first sight, a woman he believed to be the most beautiful woman in the world? And where was the rancor in his voice now at the way the marriage ended?

“There’s a second tape,” Rachel said, looking inside the envelope. By tacit approval Rachel had become the organizer of their disparate group, the one Lucy had instinctively given the tapes and instructions to. Seemingly, as the oldest, the job should have been given to Elizabeth, but she preferred the spectator role. Something she had no doubt that Lucy had detected. Elizabeth was as wary as she was impressed with her father’s attorney. She didn’t know what prompted the wariness, only that she was convinced Lucy Hargreaves was more deeply involved in her father’s life and in his estate than she wanted any of them to know.

“Does anyone need a break before I put it in?” Rachel asked.

“I do.” Ginger grinned apologetically. She was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, her back propped against the damask-covered sofa. “Too much tea.”

“Down the hall and to the left,” Christina said.

Elizabeth had taken the chair by the fireplace, straight-backed and incredibly uncomfortable. She looked longingly at the second chair of a pair of upholstered Bergères opposite the sofa, but to move would put her next to Christina. With an inward sigh, she got up and moved.

“You lasted longer than I thought you would,” Christina said.

“That chair is a relic from the Inquisition. Another ten minutes and I would have been on my knees confessing.”

“Oh my God, you
do
have a sense of humor,” Christina exclaimed.

“What is it with you two?” Rachel asked.

Christina reached for the tea pitcher. “Oh, you know how it is with sisters. But then maybe you don’t. You and Ginger seem to be hitting it off okay. What’s with that?”

Rachel appeared unfazed by Christina’s aggressive posturing. “You want me to explain why I like Ginger?”

“Sure. Maybe it will make me like her a little, too. Just don’t tell me it’s because she’s beautiful and sweet and wants to work for world peace.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the fall from such a high horse?” Rachel asked.

“Not at all. I’m an excellent rider.”

Rachel kicked off her shoes and tucked her legs under her, settling deeper into her corner of the sofa. “She is beautiful, but so what? I can’t see that it’s gotten her anything the rest of us don’t have—except hostility for winning the genetic gene pool. She’s open and honest and isn’t carrying the shitload of emotional baggage the rest of us are. Which, in my book, makes her an ideal companion.”

“You forgot about the happy homemaker over here,” Christina said. “She comes across as pretty solid.”

“Are you?” Rachel asked Elizabeth.

“Keep me out of this.”

“Come on,” Christina prodded. “Tell us something about yourself. I promise we won’t bite. Well, I won’t.”

Ginger appeared in the doorway. “Me either.”

They were all looking at her expectantly. Elizabeth wasn’t about to open a vein for them, but she’d give them something, if only to show she wasn’t the isolationist Christina portrayed. “If I’ve seemed distracted, it’s because I did something this morning that I wish I hadn’t and it’s been bothering me since.”

“So tell,” Christina said.

Elizabeth hesitated. “It’s my daughter’s last summer at college—or could be if she decides not to go to graduate school—and she decided to spend it with friends in New York.” She left out the
rather than coming home
part, fearing it would sound needy. Besides, it was missing the point. “Her father told her that if she ran out of money she wasn’t to come to us for more. She did of course—this morning. It was either send her some money I had set aside and tell her not to tell her father or wind up in the middle of a huge fight with the two of them going at each other and me getting it from both sides. I’m mad at Sam for not understanding how important this summer is to Stephanie, and I’m mad at Stephanie for putting me in this position.”

“I would have done the same thing,” Ginger said.

“Me, too,” Rachel added. “It’s just not worth all the crap you’d have to take in the middle. So what’s a couple hundred dollars if it buys a little peace?”

“Jesus, I don’t believe this. What’s wrong with you people?” Christina asked. To Elizabeth she said, “Stephanie knew exactly how to work you, and you let her get away with it. I’ll bet the first thing she did when she got off the phone was high-five her friends.”

“She’s not like that,” Elizabeth said, seething at the criticism.

“Oh,
please
. I know the routine. I’ve seen it pulled a hundred times. Hell, if I could have gotten away with it, I would have been one of the people making one of those phone calls home.”

“So what do you think Elizabeth should have done?” Rachel asked, challenging her.

“Told her no and meant it. And she should have started a long time ago. I’m the last one to give my mother credit for anything, but that’s one thing she got right.”

Elizabeth begrudgingly agreed with her. Christina spoke to a fear that had been developing in Elizabeth for a long time. When did love become indulgence? At what point did the pleasure she derived from doing for her children become destructive to their ability to do for themselves? “It’s too late now,” Elizabeth said.

Christina reached for a cookie. “Have you told her about Jessie’s money?”

Elizabeth shook her head. At least
that
she’d gotten right, and without Sam having to reason her through it.

“Good luck when you do,” Christina said.

“I hated college,” Rachel said, putting a new twist on the conversation. “I couldn’t wait to get out. I don’t know if I would have made it through if Jeff hadn’t been there to push me.”

“I was just the opposite,” Ginger countered. “Loved every minute of every class.” She waved off the plate of cookies Christina now offered to everyone. “I could have made it through in five years, but I managed to stretch it to six, much to my father’s annoyance.” She thought about what she’d said. “My
other
father. The one who paid the bills.”

“I couldn’t wait to get there and couldn’t wait to get out,” Christina said.

“Wanted to get started on your career?” Elizabeth asked. There it was. She’d sunk to Christina’s level. So much for taking the high road.

“Oh, good one, Betty,” Christina fired back.

“
Now
what?” Ginger said.

“She knows I’m working at a bottom-feeding job while I’m waiting for Daddy’s ship to dock.”

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Elizabeth said. Well, not exactly. At least not that she wanted to admit to.

Ginger looked from Christina to Elizabeth and then back again. “What kind of job are you looking for?”

“I’m a filmmaker,” she said.

Elizabeth felt an abrupt, surprising softening toward Christina at the defensive, vulnerable admission. It wasn’t like her to step on other people’s dreams, even people she didn’t like. “Too bad Ginger’s mother isn’t still around. From what I’ve read, it isn’t what you know but who you know in the movie business.”

“Ten million dollars is all the introduction I’m going to need.”

“We probably should get back to the tape,” Rachel said. “Elizabeth has a long drive home.”

“You know, you could stay here next time if you didn’t want to make the trip in one day.” Christina seemed as surprised at the blurted invitation as Elizabeth. “It’s still Jessie’s house, at least it still belongs to the estate. He was your father as much as he was mine, and I’m sure Rhona wouldn’t mind.”

To dismiss the invitation out of hand would diminish the effort it had taken to make it. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

Rachel put the tape in and hit play.

Jessie’s Story

I left the Farnsworth ranch with the lease in my pocket and stars in my eyes. I was in love. It wasn’t what I’d felt for Wynona, but something that was pure and complete and let me know love was more than sex, it was a house and kids and coming home every night to sit by the fire and talk about the things that had happened that day.

With marriage in mind and the leases locked up, I started working on the pipe companies, offering them the same deal I had the ranchers and first dibs on the money when the oil started flowing. I couldn’t get workers to give up paying jobs for a lick and a promise, but a number of them were willing to give me nights and Sundays.

I rolled along thinking I was the biggest bull in the barnyard when what I was up to got back to some powerful people who didn’t care for the idea that a hayseed like me had bested them. They tried talking the ranchers into canceling their leases, but west Texas produced men with stubborn streaks wider than the Rio Grande. What they were slow to give they refused to take back.

With the ranchers holding firm, they came after my workers, beating a couple of them senseless just to show they could, and that they could get away with it. The threats worked on about half of the men, but the rest, the really tough ones, got together and decided they would give up their paying jobs to sign on as part owners the way the ranchers had. They moved into the field, living together for safety, working every hour they weren’t eating or sleeping. The pipe went down twice as fast as it had before. We were a month ahead of where I figured we’d be come September—halfway to the New Mexico border, where the new refinery was even further along—when the pipe shipments stopped.

I tried begging and bribing, but whoever got there before me knew the magic words and there was nothing I could say that mattered. I was watching the last of the pipe being laid and feeling as close to giving up as I’d ever been before or since when I looked up and saw a streak of dust coming at me across the horizon. In the thirty minutes it took Wyatt Farnsworth to reach me I’d imagined myself doing battle with the half-dozen thugs I was sure were on their way to fit me for a pine box.

The first thing Wyatt did when he eased himself out of the truck was check his mustache to make sure the curl hadn’t come undone in the heat and wind. He ambled over to where I was standing, touching the brim of his dust-laden Stetson and nodding his head in greeting. “Hear you been havin’ some trouble getting across my land. Cattle don’t much care for you boys hanging round.”

“Can’t lay pipe I don’t have.”

“Yeah, heard about that, too.” He reached into his back pocket and handed me an envelope.

“What’s this?”

“Another five percent of the business added to what I have coming if you take it. Think it over and let me know.” With that, he turned and headed back the way he’d come, leaving me holding a blank check and the directions to a pipe manufacturing plant in Mexico.

Another five percent left me less than twenty. But twenty of something was a hell of a lot better than twenty-five of nothing. And there was an upside that I’m sure Farnsworth hadn’t figured when he’d made his offer. With him as the second biggest shareholder, I found it necessary and convenient to ride out his way for a little jawing whenever I felt the need to cast eyes on his daughter.

Either he wasn’t as smart as I’d given him credit for or I was better at hiding my feelings than I thought, because it took him almost six months to warn me off Denise. Turned out she wasn’t the fifteen or sixteen I’d guessed but thirteen. That should have dumped water on the fire I had going for her, but I was too far gone for anything like that to get in the way. Her being thirteen gave me time to get the business going without worrying she’d get tired of waiting or that someone else would come along.

It took another year before the first shipment of oil left the fields of west Texas in the Reed and Company Pipeline and landed at the refinery in New Mexico, and another year and a half after that before I had enough money put aside to go out to California to find my folks and keep my promise.

It wasn’t a big secret that I planned to ask Denise to marry me when I got back. I’d been heading that direction for almost three years and had become such a regular at the farmhouse that Denise’s mother moved another chair into the dining room and left it there.

When it came time to leave, Wyatt drove me to the train station up in Lubbock, surprising both me and Denise when he let her come along to tell me good-bye. With twenty minutes before my train left, figuring it wasn’t near enough time to get into any real trouble, Wyatt left us alone to find himself a box of Cuban cigars.

I decided then was the time to give Denise the locket I’d bought for her birthday. She cried when I put it on. I puffed up more than I had a right, thinking it meant more than it did. I caught people looking at us as they passed, the women with curiosity, the men with envy. She must have seen it, too, because she did something she’d never done before. Right there in front of all those strangers she held on to the front of my jacket, came up on her toes, and kissed me. It wasn’t full on the lips—she’d closed her eyes and missed hitting me square by half my mouth. But it didn’t matter. I was seeing stars and my heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to break one of my ribs.

“How was that?” she asked.

“Fine,” I mumbled, not knowing if I should kiss her back right there or haul her someplace more private and do it right.

“Just fine?”

“It was wonderful, Denise. The best.”

She smiled. “Want me to do it again?”

“More than anything.”

She looked around. “Right here? Right now?”

I took her arm and led her to a doorway where I figured Wyatt wouldn’t see us. “I dream about kissing you all the time.”