Chapter Twelve
Rhett
When Emily pulled up to the house, I could see her father in the passenger seat. I thought about the impression that I’d gotten of him the first time that I’d encountered him. I still wasn’t sure why I’d agreed to this meeting, but something about how earnest Emily had been, and how obviously she’d wanted it to happen, had sold me on the idea. If there was going to be any kind of truce, if a truce was even possible, it was going to have to be between me and the guy who was actually in charge: Emily’s father, Martin Lewis.
He got out of her car and I had to stifle a groan. He was in the kind of clothes that I was sure he thought would help him blend in, but there was just something about the way that he wore them that looked fake. He wore dungarees and a work shirt, but they were spotlessly clean—he must have bought them the day before, or maybe even on the way out to Mustang Ridge—along with a pair of boots that looked fairly well-worn, but still the kind of thing that a guy would spend a lot of money on.
I came out of the house to meet them on the driveway, and extended my hand to the man as Emily made introductions.
“This is Rhett, Daddy,” she said. “Rhett, this is my father, Martin Lewis.”
“Good to finally meet you officially, Mr. Lewis,” I said, shaking his hand. I had to admit that Martin Lewis had a good handshake: firm, dry, but not crushing. A businessman’s handshake, like the dean of the school at Notre Dame had, and the guy who’d signed me to my first year at the NFL.
“Good to meet you too, Mr. Baxter,” Emily’s father said.
“Please call me Rhett,” I insisted, as politely as I could. “Everyone around here does, and I’m still not used to ‘Mr. Baxter’ being anyone but my Dad.”
He smiled. “Then you call me Martin, how about that?”
I took my hand back from him as politely as I could and nodded.
“I think I can do that,” I said. My impression of him still wasn’t exactly good, but I could see he was making an effort to be personable.
“Emily, good to see you again,” my mother said, coming out onto the porch.
“Actually, I was just about to leave—I’ve got work that needs doing,” Emily said apologetically.
“Surely you can stay for a cup of coffee?”
Emily looked at her father, and I saw the old man looked relieved at the invitation.
“I think we could all use a cup of coffee,” I said. “Get to talking a bit.”
We went inside, and my mom served up coffee and cookies she’d made the night before.
“You know, this is not that different from the house I grew up in,” Martin said, looking around. “My mother had a stove just like that one.”
“This old thing?” Mom laughed, and I looked in her direction a little sharply. She’d only ever taken that tone—flirty, a little bit—with my father, and hearing it come out in the presence of Emily’s dad made me uncomfortable. “I used to hate it, to tell you the truth. But after working on it and with it for thirty-some years, I can’t imagine using any of those newer models.”
“Probably just glad it isn’t wood-burning, right?” Martin gave my mom a little grin and I saw that Emily didn’t look any more comfortable about the flirting between our parents than I felt.
“Oh lord—I stayed with one of the older families a while back while Rhett was in college, just kind of helping out around the house. They were super old-school, and of course their stove was wood-fired.” Mom shook her head. “In this day and age! Can you believe it?”
I watched my mom and Emily’s dad talking to each other, and after a minute or two I sort of lost my sense of being uncomfortable about the fact that they were flirting. It was something I’d seen in town. Even people who didn’t have any actual romantic interest in each other tended to flirt as a sort of way to grease the wheels, like being polite.
I hated to admit it, but it actually gave me a better impression of Martin Lewis. Watching him interact with my mom, hearing him talk about the house he’d grown up in, told me he’d grown up not all that differently from me. Maybe he hadn’t had farmers for parents, but not far off from it. Maybe they’d been ranchers, or at least they might have run one of those tourist ranches.
“I have an idea,” I said, cutting in when there was an opening. “Why don’t you spend the day out here? Do some good old-fashioned hard work, see how you feel about the town?”
“I don’t know if I’m in shape for that, Rhett,” Martin said, shaking his head.
“What I have to do today, well, it’s not much more strenuous than a day of golf,” I said. “Emily, back me up.”
“Well you worked me pretty hard,” Emily said. “But I think you’re up for it, Dad. In fact, I think it’d be good for you to spend a day working like an honest Joe.”
“You’re hanging around town, right?” he asked.
Emily nodded. “I’m supposed to be making rounds again,” she said. “Seeing about what we can offer people, what price they’re looking for to sell.” She looked at me.
“I won’t get in your way,” I told her cheerfully. “Not today, at least.”
She gave a huff of impatience, but then turned to Mom. “These cookies are wonderful, Mrs. Baxter. But if I eat any more of them, I’m not going to be able to move.”
Mom laughed and got up from the table, and that seemed to be the cue for Emily to go as well.
“So, what do you say, Martin? Willing to spend a day as a small-town farmer?” Mom asked.
Martin looked from me to his daughter, to my mom and then back to me.
I added, “Or are you too far away from your roots to put in an honest day’s work?”
It was just on the edge of almost being rude, but I was pretty sure I could get away with it. I was right.
“Well if you put it that way, I don’t really have a choice, do I?” Emily’s dad grinned. “I’ll work with you for the day, get a real feel for how things are around here.”
“And I’ll come and get you at the end of the day,” Emily said.
I took stock of what I needed to do and crossed a few things off of my mental list; there was no way I was going to put Martin Baxter through a real day on the farm, but I wanted to give him the full experience—sort of, in a way, reconnect him with what I thought his roots might be.
We headed toward the fields, and waved goodbye to Emily and my mom.
I turned to Martin. “We’re going to check the traps, see if any of the fence needs mending, and then head into town for some errands.”
His brand-new work clothes were going to get dirty—that much I was sure I wanted to see happen.
I showed him the path through the fields, and we went through the rows, checking the traps I’d laid for the different creatures that might come to try and eat my crops.
“Emily and I did this when she came over to work for half a day,” I told him. “Among other things.”
I wasn’t about to tell the father of a girl I’d had sex with what those “other things” were—at least, not what all of them were.
“She’s always been real active,” Martin said. “Hiking, rock climbing. She played softball in high school.”
“So, she’s always had a bit of a competitive streak, then?” I found one of the traps filled with a rabbit—I cleared it and tossed the carcass into the sack to get rid of later.
“She’s always wanted to be a winner,” Martin explained. “Focused. None of the other teams could shake her when she was at bat—no matter how they tried.”
I thought about that as we moved on in the direction of the next trap. I liked to keep the traps in different parts of the field, in different spots—to make sure that none of the critters that might come to try and browse at my crops would get too used to the traps being in a particular place, to avoid them.
“Was she always like that, though? Even as a kid?” I tried to picture Emily as a little girl—blond hair done in braided pigtails, maybe, her green eyes bigger in proportion to her face, looking adorable and probably a little scrappy, too. If she’d been born and raised in Mustang Ridge, she’d probably have ended up on the softball team there, too; and she’d probably be exactly the kind of girl I’d have wanted to date as a teenager. Maybe she would have stayed in town, or maybe she’d have taken that ambition she seemed to have and gone on to UT or UH and moved to the city she lived in anyway.
“As a kid, she was, well, pretty much a kid. Bright, always liked to climb trees, ride her bike all day long.”
I smiled a bit to myself. “Sounds like you’re proud of her.”
“I am,” Martin said. “That girl’s going to take over the company one day, when I get to be too old to do this anymore.”
We finished checking the traps and I tossed the sack of dead animals into the dumpster to be carted off by the trash collector the next day.
“Now we’re going to check the perimeter fence, and then we’ll head into town,” I explained. I liked to try and walk as much of the fence as possible, but I figured for Martin’s sake I’d use the golf cart I kept around for quicker trips to specific parts of the fence farthest away from the house.
“It’s a constant job, isn’t it?” he asked as we both climbed onto the golf cart and started off towards the perimeter fence.
“Yeah.” I thought—I hoped—that if I could just get through to him how valuable it all was, how it was a real life, that maybe I could change the man’s plans. I almost definitely couldn’t change his plans altogether, but with enough pressure from the community, and if I could get Emily’s father’s eyes opened, I might be able to limit how much they did.
We went around the perimeter and I made a few mental notes about the weak spots; they weren’t bad enough to need immediate fixing, but over the next few days I would probably want to reinforce them, replace a few posts and boards.
“So, you grew up in a town not much bigger than this one, right?” I asked.
Martin nodded. “I lived out east of Houston,” Martin told me. “We sold the old home place after my parents passed, got a good value for it—it was one of the first really big deals I got going. I convinced a few other people in my town who weren’t making as much as they used to that they should sell, too, and brought in a big buyer.”
“And you got a nice payday, and so did a few other people,” I said.
“My brother and sister and I all made out good,” Martin agreed. “So did the five other people who sold their land. Best decision they ever made—and the old town now has an Arby’s, a Walmart, and an actual shopping mall, along with about ten thousand new residents.”
I looked at him for a moment before starting the cart back up. How was I going to argue with the kind of logic that Martin Lewis had going on? He saw that as a win, and I guessed—for that particular situation—it was.
“But what about the people who were still farming?” I asked. “Or whatever the thing was in your town?” I drove us back toward the house, thinking about the next phase in the day’s business: getting Martin to actually meet some people in town, see what they were like. “Didn’t you think it was a shame that people got pushed out like that?”
“There are still some people farming out that way,” Martin said. “And as the town’s built up, the people who don’t want to farm anymore can actually get better money for their property when they sell—it works out good for them.”
I chewed on that, mentally, and pulled into the barn. “Let’s just grab a few things from town,” I said. “I need some stuff for the tractor, a few things for Mom—stuff like that.” I smiled at Martin. “Try not to do the big sales thing while we’re out and about, okay?”
We went into town and I made a point of going as many places as possible for the different things I needed, taking my time and introducing Martin around. Most of the people in the town already knew who he was, and a few people looked at me askance, wondering, obviously, why I was walking around with someone I was working against.
“I’m trying to give Martin a feel for what makes Mustang Ridge great,” I said, before people could talk themselves out of asking me if I’d changed sides. “I want him to understand what it is he’s trying to do in the town.”
“No offense to you, Mr. Lewis, but I think you’re on a fool’s errand, Rhett,” Johnny Knowles said to me outside of the administration building. “If he cared about this town, he wouldn’t be selling us out. We’re not his people, anyway.”
“Times have been tough around here, but you’re not going to find many people willing to let go of their land for a pittance,” Johnny’s wife Claire said, shaking her head. “Most of us here like the life we’re living, even if it’s a bit leaner than it used to be.”
“Why are you all against developing the town? That’s all I want to know—I want to understand,” Martin said, and he sounded pretty sincere.
“We’re not against developing it as such,” Claire said. “But we’re against what amounts to killing the town. Bringing in one smaller chain—that makes jobs for people who might not have them otherwise, supports the local economy. But a bunch of new companies coming in? That just means the smaller businesses die off, people move away, the community dies.”
Martin got the same reaction from more than a few people we ran into throughout the town as I picked up oil and a couple of parts for the tractor, and got some things on Mom’s grocery list, little errands like that. Over the course of the hour we were in town, I saw Martin’s behavior change. He went from talking a lot to listening a lot, and I thought that maybe it was sinking in for him, what it was he was doing.
Emily was back at the house when we drove up in my truck, and she was looking as cute as ever. Shame you gotta be against her, I thought. In another world, maybe. I pushed the thought out of my mind.
“You two want to stay for dinner? Mom’d love to have you,” I said.
Part of me meant it—part of me wished them both well away, for my own peace of mind. I thought Martin might be changing his thoughts on what he wanted for the town, but I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t need the distraction of him flirting with my mother, or the presence of Emily at the kitchen table. I needed to relax and plan out what I was going to do on the farm and in town the next couple of days. Just in case Martin didn’t back off or change course, I still needed to talk to whoever in town would back me. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst—that had always been my father’s advice, and I intended to stick with it.
“We’ve got a dinner date,” Emily said. “Rain check?”
“Sure thing,” I said, nodding. I couldn’t help but hope that I’d be able to manage to have dinner with Emily and not her father. I wouldn’t call Martin Lewis a friend, but I thought he wasn’t as bad a guy as I’d originally thought. If he could do the right thing, we might become acquaintances. If things went well, I might be able to actually get to know Emily—but I wasn’t necessarily going to bet on it just yet. She might be cute, and she might be smart and tough and ambitious—all things I liked and appreciated—but she was a city girl, and I didn’t think even she fully understood my problem with her dad’s plan for Mustang Ridge.
“I’ll catch up with you in a day or two,” Martin said. “I’ve got a lot to think about.”
“Maybe I’ll call ahead and we can make dinner plans,” Emily said hopefully. “I’ll bring dessert.”
“Sounds good,” I told her.
I shook Martin’s hand again and watched him get into Emily’s car, seeing them off before I headed back into the house to let Mom know we were going to be alone for dinner as usual.