Austin
My stomach wakes me with a growl, complaining about the bowl of chili I skipped last night. I roll over and groan. Another thing I’m too old for: sleeping on a hard wood floor. I struggle to my knees, and remember my bruised foot when I try to stand. “Goddamn that hurts.” I hop around until it stops bitching.
Wishing for coffee, I glance to the funky old gas stove in the kitchen. I could probably get it to work if I cleaned out the lines. I add a store run to my list of things to do today, dress, and head for Mom’s for food and coffee. When I pull in, Troy’s BMW is still covered and in the same spot. That’s odd.
I stand on the porch a moment, undecided. Knock? Ring the bell? Walk in? What is the etiquette when you return to the house you grew up in? I’m not a kid anymore, but I’m not a guest, either. To cover my bases, I knock and open the front door. “Hello?”
“I’m in the kitchen, Austin.”
Mom is sipping coffee and reading the paper at the kitchen table. “I’ll bet it was musty and drafty over there.”
“Yeah, but I figure if I’m living there, it’ll give me incentive to get it weatherproofed by the time winter hits.” Not her fault this house makes me feel like I walked into a happier-time-warp. “Why is Troy still here? Where’s Dad?”
“They’re out feeding cattle.” She stands and walks to the fridge. “You must be starving. How about some bacon and eggs?”
“That’d be great.” I give her a hug. “Have I told you lately how much I love your cooking?”
“Flattery will get you breakfast. Pour yourself some coffee.”
“Yes’m.” I like coffee in the morning, but I’ve never needed it for my existence, like Tig. Stop. If I’m going to move on, I’ve got to quit relating every everyday thing to a Carly memory. I grab my mug from the cupboard, the one with UNLIKE GOLF, BULL RIDING REQUIRES TWO BALLS, that Carly got me—Stop. I pour from the industrial-size coffeemaker on the counter. No Keurig here—it’d wear out in a few months. I lean against the counter and watch Mom work.
When the bacon is spitting in the pan, she wipes her hands on her apron and turns to me. “Hon, what happened?”
“I messed up.” I pace from the island to the door and back. “Tig told me she wanted me to come off the road so many times I figured it was just our yearly fight, and went on with business.” I run my hand through my hair. “I took for granted that she’d always be here, waiting. How can it be so clear you’re an idiot after, and not before?”
“Oh, honey, y’all have been through this before. She loves you. It’ll work out.” She forks bacon out of the cast-iron skillet and cracks three eggs into the grease.
The fact that she dodged the Troy question reminds me that Mom can keep a secret. Besides, if you can’t trust your mother, you might as well hang the trust thing up. Carly’s secret has been eating me up inside. Maybe it’ll help to let it out. Maybe Mom will have some woman insight. “It’ll work out. Just not the way anyone expects.”
She turns at my tone, the spatula in her hand dripping grease. “What is it? Just tell me.”
“It’s my fault, really. Don’t you dare think bad of her for it—”
“Austin, I’ve known that girl almost as long as I’ve known you. You couldn’t tell me anything that would make me think bad of Carly Beauchamp.”
“No one took her seriously, that we were broken up. Not me, not the town. She took it for a month, then headed to Albuquerque, to blow off steam.”
“Not alone?”
“Yeah.” Insight hits in a starburst. “You know, it just occurred to me. She couldn’t see it was dumb until it was too late. Just like me.”
“This story is not going to end well, is it?” She’s standing looking at me, and can’t see the smoke signal of overdone eggs.
I step around her and flip off the burner. I’m starving, and what the hell—they’ll only be black on the bottom. “You go sit. I’ll be right behind you.” I push them onto the plate with the bacon, then carry it and my coffee to the table.
“She’s pregnant, Mom. With some other guy’s baby.” The blunt-force fact smothers all sound, save the ticking of the clock in the kitchen.
She makes a strangled sound in her throat. “Does she love him?”
“The guy?” My hand fists on the tablecloth. “She doesn’t even know who he is. Where he is. And she’s not looking, anyway.”
Her fingers feel their way to my fist and unravel it, then twine with mine. “Has she decided what she’s going to do now?”
I can’t look at her. “She’s keeping the baby.”
Her fingers tighten. “Good for her.”
“I don’t know how she can just forget who fathered that baby, and love it anyway.”
“It’s not who made it; it’s an innocent soul, Austin.”
I feel as small as a scorpion, and about as nasty, but I can’t lie. I just shake my head.
Mom’s fingers let go. “Austin Patrick Davis, surely if that girl can bear this, you can…” Her face falls to disappointed lines, and her hand retreats to her lap. “No, I can see that you don’t get it, do you?”
“Even if I could get past the fact that she slept with someone else, what if the baby doesn’t have red hair and freckles?” I look up. “What if it looks like him? The only thing worse than not stepping up would be to be resentful of an innocent child. To resent Carly. To turn the beautiful thing we had into a twisted, ugly freak show that we’d both be sorry for, then have to live with forever.”
She sits a moment, thinking. I know that look. She’s waffling between a lecture and a sales job. When she clasps her hands on the table, I know she’s decided.
“You and Troy are grown men. It’s hard for me to accept that I can’t paddle your butts and send you to the corner to think about your actions.” Her knuckles go white. “But you make me want to go cut a switch, I swear to God.” Her eyes narrow. “All this time, I thought you really loved that girl. Now it’s clear that you’re not capable. And that makes me so sad.”
That dart hits, and the poison that spreads under my skin feels familiar. “There’s more problems than that, Mom. Carly’s changed.”
“Well, of course she has. A baby changes everything.”
“Her and me, we used to be two halves of one whole. Now, I don’t know what is going on under all that hair.” I give up trying to be all mature, and drop my head in my hands. “She doesn’t want anything to do with me.” Except sex, apparently. This isn’t helping. It feels like fire ants are crawling under my skin. I can’t do this anymore. I stand. “I gotta go, Mom.”
Her voice follows me out the door. “What about your eggs?”
Remembering a bag of jerky leftover from the drive home, I retrieve it from the floorboard of my truck and chew it as I head for the barn behind the house.
The barn is cool, shady, and full of the smells of my childhood: hay and horses, manure and leather. I find Dad spreading fresh straw in a stall.
I step into the stall and hold out my hand. “Give me that. Why are you doing the scut work?”
“I’m not too good, or too old to be taking care of the animals.” But he hands it over. His shoulders started sloping a couple years ago. They’re now downright stooped, his hands gnarled, the knuckles swollen with arthritis from a lifetime of hard work out in the open.
“No, but I’d say you’ve put your time in.” I take the fork and start spreading straw. “Where’s Troy?”
He glances out the breezeway, past the paddock, to the golden plain beyond. “He went for a ride.”
“What’s up with him, anyway? He usually blows back to the big city before someone asks him to get his hands dirty.” I move to the next stall.
“Ah, don’t be too hard on your brother. He’s hit a rough patch.” He follows and puts his boot on the lowest stall slat.
I break up a flake of straw from the bale on the floor and shake it into the corners. “What kind of trouble?”
Dad avoids my look. “He’s bedding down with us for a while.”
“Trouble at home?”
Dad moves the toothpick he’s working to the other side of his mouth.
“Whoa.” Troy and Darcy always went together like diamonds and platinum. Darcy is an Adriano, and the Adrianos were as close as New Mexico gets to royalty. Their ranch covers over a hundred thousand acres, thanks to what’s rumored to be a shady land grant back when we were still a territory.
Another unshakable relationship bites the dust.
“A lot of that going around lately.”
“What?” Dad asks.
“Nothing, just talking to myself.”
Dad heads back to the house, and his breakfast. I finish with the stalls and saddle my old buddy, Cochise. I got him as a colt for Christmas my freshman year of high school. The name came natural, since he’s a black-and-white paint, and because I watched way too many Bonanza reruns as a kid. Troy’s mare, Smooth, is missing from the paddock.
I tie some wire to the saddle skirt, put the pliers and stretcher in the saddlebag, and a ten-minute lope later, I spot them in the far end of the farthest corner of our land. Even out here, he’s immaculate: creased jeans, white broadcloth shirt, clean straw hat, and spanking-new ostrich boots. He looks like he stepped off the cover of Western Horseman. If I had a doubt Troy was avoiding me, his pinched face would have killed it.
“What do you want?”
“I need a reason?”
“Nah, I guess not.”
I pull Cochise alongside and fall to a walk. A hawk’s piercing hunting cry, the swish of grass, and the jingle of bits are the only sounds. Troy and I aren’t real close, but we never had a problem talking before. “Peaceful out here, huh?”
“Yeah.” He keeps his gaze between his horse’s ears.
We continue in awkward silence until I pull to a stop at a place in the fence where the wire’s bent over and trampled down. “Goddamn bulls are assholes.”
Troy stops his horse and leans his forearms on the horn. “Nah. Just horny.”
I step down and untie the wire from the saddle. “What, you gonna sit and watch?” I pull the leather gloves from my back pocket.
He puts out his hands, palms out. “No gloves.”
“Pussy.” I reach into the saddlebag and toss him a pair.
“I didn’t come out here to be a hired hand.”
“You’d rather leave it for Dad to do?”
That gets him moving. In no time, his new boots are grass-stained and we’re both sweating.
“Here, hold this.” I hand him the one side of broken wire, while I lock the crimper on the other piece. “Why are you out here, anyway? Why aren’t you in Albuquerque?”
“Why are you baching it in the homestead house?” He hands over the wire.
The stretcher clicks, pulling the wire taut. “It’s easier if you use the pliers, instead of your hands to make a loop.”
“You always were a girl. Shit!” I pull off the glove and suck the puncture in my thumb.
“Told you.”
“Yeah, you always were a know-it-all, too.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I put the glove back on and give the wire another twist. “Why are you telling Dad it’s not smart to run some bucking stock?”
“Because it’s not.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s what I do for a living, Austin. It’s not a smart business move.” He grunts, and pulls the stretcher one more click.
One click too far. Barbed wire whistles past my ear, and the stretcher falls on my knuckles. “Son of a bitch!” I shake my hand and sit back on my heels. I pull the glove, and touch my earlobe. My fingers come away bloody. “You trying to take me out?”
“Serves you right.” His growl comes from between clenched teeth.
“Why the hell are you mad? I’m the injured party here.”
He throws his hands up. “If I’d wanted to be a cowboy, I wouldn’t have gone to college. I don’t belong here, damn it.”
“Oh, I see, as always, you’re the smart one, and I’m a grunt for using my hands to actually work for a living.”
“It’s always about Austin, isn’t it? The whole world doesn’t revolve around you and your rodeo-star life. I was talking about me.” He steps to his horse and retrieves the reins. “See you later, little brother. I’ve got real work to do.” He mounts and lopes off.
Forgetting my glove, I grab the stretcher and a barb digs the length of my forearm. Goddamn city boy. I yell after him, “You’re not good at that job, either.”
* * *
Carly
I’m on refill patrol Wednesday morning when Austin comes through the door. He’s limping, his clothes are wrinkled, and his face is set in the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. He looks like a train wreck. That magnetic pull tugs, and my heart pumps sympathy. I set the pitcher of coffee on the table so as not to drop it.
The breakfast crowd goes silent, like there’s going to be a shootout or something.
“Carly.” He takes off his hat and holds it at his side. “Could I talk to you for a second?” He looks around, meeting the stare of every mother’s son in the place—the daughters, too. “Alone?”
When that last word wobbles just a bit, I know what it took him to walk through that door.
“Of course.” I pat the high-schooler closest to me on the shoulder. “Patsy, make the rounds for me, will you? I’ll just be a minute.”
Eyes big, she nods and stands.
I tip my chin to the door. He follows me and opens it. Dang railway station is just a big glass fishbowl, with windows all around. The diners even look like goldfish, with their eyes bugging and their mouths opening and closing with gossip. I keep walking, but not too far. I don’t want people to think…whatever they’re going to think. I duck down the alley past the dime store, turn, and wait to hear what was important enough for Austin to run the breakfast crowd gauntlet.
“I wanted to let you know, I’m home for good. Well, not home, exactly. I’m staying at the homestead house. I’ll be fixing it up while I settle in, working for Dad and looking around for some good cows to have inseminated, and…” His blush shoots up from the collar of his shirt.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to blurt. I guess I’m kinda weirded out about all this.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I am telling you.” Our old joke brings only a weak smile to his lips. “Look, the way I figure it, the only way for people to stop staring when we’re in the same room together is if we’re okay being in the same room together. Eventually, they’ll move on to juicier gossip.”
My hand steals to cover my apron-covered pooch. “Yeah, I’ve got an idea about what that’ll be.”
His blush gets a mottled red tinge. “Aw, hell, Carly. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”
“Stop it. Now you’re making me nervous.” I take his arm and shake it. When his rock-hard bicep jumps under my hand, I drop it. “We’ve been friends since we were getting sand in our diapers. Surely we can get past this…awkward stage.”
We look at each other, separated by a wall of words that we can’t say. “We’ll act normal, and someday, it’ll be normal.” My brain whispers a bad word about cattle by-products. I ignore it, and extend my hand.
He steps in and gives me an awkward man-hug, complete with patting my back. Air rushes out of him in a huge sigh. “Oh, good. Because I really don’t want to eat grease down at the Lunch Box.”
“Why didn’t you go to your mom’s?”
“I’m a little old to be parking my boots under Mom’s table every meal.” He lowers his head to watch his fingers work the brim of his hat. “Discovered I’m too old for a lot of things, lately.”
It sounds like I’m not the only one doing some deep soul-excavation lately. I knew he had come off the road, of course. Gossips were more than happy to impart that juicy tidbit.
Isn’t it funny how the mind works? It shields you from the hardest lessons, giving you time to get ready for the truth’s ultimate blow. Looking back, I can see that pushing him to come home all these years, and our eventual breakup, was me, testing a theory my brain hadn’t fully let me in on yet.
That what he wanted would always come first. And I followed along, because that’s what I always do. I hoped he loved me, like I love him. Even now, I can’t hate him for it—he isn’t withholding it from me—he’s just incapable of that kind of love. But now that I know the difference, I realize I’m not willing to settle for anything less than the all-out, love-you-down-to-the-nasty-parts, kind. I push my lips into what I hope is a smile, but probably isn’t. “I’m happy for you, Austin, truly. I hope you’re a huge success.”
He glances around. “Well, prob’ly be best if we walk in together, huh?”
I act like I don’t see his arm hanging out, waiting for me to take it. One thing to wish him well—another to take a step down a dead-end road that I’ve been down before. There’re enough mistakes to be made, without going back and making the same ones over again. I’m going to be a parent. I need to be responsible.
I won’t have much face to save soon, anyway. I follow him out of the alley.
We walk into the diner. Austin heads for a seat at the counter, and I snag the coffee pot from Patsy.
The room is in freeze-frame—no kidding—forks have stopped halfway to open mouths. “Just so you know? Austin and I may inhabit the same room, breathe the same oxygen, maybe even—ohmygod—exchange a pleasantry now and again. Y’all are going to have to get over yourselves.”
It’s quiet enough that I can hear Fish chuckle in the kitchen.
I put a hand on my hip. “People, deal.” My words bounce off the windows.
Tentative conversations start up, and I nod to Austin and resume refill patrol.
It’d be humorous if I didn’t know the next boom to hit. Our breakup is a firecracker compared to the Surface-to-Air Missile of my not-Austin’s baby. How long can I keep the secret? Three weeks? Surely not much more than a month. I’m going to have to figure out how to handle that.
I steal a glance over at the bar. He needs a haircut. I used to love trimming it: running my fingers through the clean, wet strands. There’s just something so personal about that. So sexy. Stop it, Carly.
Guess he’ll have to head down to the Pit Stop Barbershop from now on.