One From The Heart (20 page)

“No, Elizabeth.”

“Oh, well,” she said, shrugging. “Here comes Daddy and Petey. I think I’d like to talk to Ernie now. You’ll tell him I was … nice about things? The way he wanted?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Come see Rufus, Anna-Hannah!” Petey cried, grabbing her hand.

“Hannah,” Elizabeth said, pausing on her way out, “thank you for taking such good care of Petey.”

“You’re welcome,” Hannah said.

Petey was pulling her toward an outside door. “Do you mind if I walk with you, Hannah?” Jake asked.

She looked at him gravely. This was his house, and she was in no position to mind or not.

“Petey, leave Hannah’s arm hooked to her, will you? That way,” he said, nodding toward the door that Petey was working so hard to get her to.

They walked out together, and Hannah caught a brief glimpse of Mim’s worried face as the door closed behind them. The sun was bright, but the air was still chilly. She pulled her coat closer around her and walked at her father’s side, thinking of all the times she’d imagined doing just this when she was a child. Petey danced on ahead, leading them across the drive and down a landscaped path toward a wooden fence.

“Hannah, wait,” Jake said, catching her arm. “There’s something I want to say to you—now, before I lose my nerve. I told you yesterday there wasn’t a thing in this world I could do about being a father to you now, and there isn’t. I’m not a man who makes apologies, but I want to tell you something about me and about your mama back then, so maybe you’ll understand things better.”

He stopped, glancing into her eyes, then looking away. “I’m a … proud man, Hannah. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat any of this to Watson.” He looked back at her, but she didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to make any promises. Her mother was dead, and she was a grown woman. The past didn’t matter now.

Jake Browne gave a long sigh. “You know, you remind me of myself, Hannah. You’re not going to give me the time of day because you don’t think I deserve it.”

“That’s the way you treat Ernie,” she said quietly. He was about to say something, but apparently thought better of it.

“I’d best get on with it,” he said instead. “I made up my mind to tell you this and I’m going to do it. I reckon I owe you that.”

“You don’t owe me anything—” Hannah began, but he held up his hand.

“When I was a young man, I fell head over heels in love with your mother. The only problem with that was she didn’t love me. She liked me well enough, but she wasn’t in love with me the way I was with her. I wasn’t used to taking no for an answer. I was young. I was good-looking. And I had money and the arrogance to go with it. I courted your mother anyway. She was a strong woman, but she was no match for me when I had my mind made up. I kept after her until I wore her down. I
made
her say she’d marry me, just by sheer persistence, if nothing else. And she did it.

“She married me, but she wasn’t happy with me. We had two babies, and she wanted to leave me—for no reason that I could see. I wasn’t a bad husband—not great, maybe, but I never hit her or ran with other women or anything like that. I couldn’t believe she wanted to go. My pride wouldn’t let me believe it. I knew she never loved me, but I said there had to be some reason. She couldn’t want to go off and leave a fine upstanding man like me for nothing. I said there was somebody else she wanted, somebody else she’d already had maybe. I convinced myself that you were this other man’s child. I knew that wasn’t so, but I said it anyway. I said it until I believed it—because my pride said I
had
to believe it.

“I think I must have been half crazy. I loved her, you see. I finally said she could go and be damned. She could take you, but she couldn’t have
my
child. She tried every way she knew to talk me out of keeping Elizabeth. In the end she went with you. There were times when I’d have then on watch all night in case she came back and tried to steal Elizabeth. And she never gave up wanting her other baby until Elizabeth got old enough to be hurt by it.”

Petey was calling, and he broke off, looking down the path. “She never forgave me for it. I guess I tried to make it up to Elizabeth for what I’d done to the two of you. You were right. I gave in to Elizabeth’s every whim. Mim tried to tell me I was ruining her, but I couldn’t say no to her. That’s why she’s like she is.”

Hannah walked off from him a short way, her hands jammed into her pockets.
Such pain
, she thought.
Hers and Elizabeth’s, her mother’s, his. And for nothing. A man’s pride
. She looked back at him.

“I had a good life,” she said, wanting to hurt him and to comfort him all at the same time. To her surprise, he smiled.

“Oh, darlin’, I know that. You lived with your mama. Your mama was a rare jewel. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”

He abruptly turned and walked away, leaving her with tears in her eyes and with Petey still calling her to come and see a cow named Rufus. She watched her father walk back toward the house, watched him meet and ignore Ernie along the way, only to whirl around and say something to him at the last minute.

Ernie listened to him, hooking his thumbs in his jeans pockets and staring straight ahead, and then walked on, apparently without comment.

“What did he say to you?” Hannah asked when he reached her. He took her hand and walked with her down the path toward the wooden fence where Petey stood petting Rufus.

“What did he say to
you?
” he countered, looking at her closely.

“I asked first.”

Ernie grinned. “He said, Hannah Rose, that if I didn’t treat you right, he’d kick my butt from here to Tucumcari—only with a little more colorful language.”

She managed a smile, and he reached up to caress her cheek. “You okay?”

But she didn’t have to answer. Petey was there, pulling her by the hand so she could marvel over someone’s overgrown bovine 4-H project—a cow that seemed to think she was a dog. Hannah admired Rufus, joked with Petey and Ernie, laughed in all the right places, and when it was time to go, she even managed a few dry-eyed good-byes. Mim’s was particularly difficult, because she clearly knew what Hannah’s father had said to her, and she was kind enough not to comment. Hannah held Petey for a long time. But for her, she might never have met Ernie Watson. She hugged Elizabeth and gave Petey back to her. And that left only her father.

She stood for a moment, staring up at him. “Goodbye, Jake,” she said finally, her voice low but steady. He gave a curt nod and walked away. He still wasn’t a father to her, but he was a real person now. She knew what to call him at last. And he was right. Because of his revelation, she was beginning to understand. The only problem was that now she’d exchanged one pain for another. Such a waste, she kept thinking. Her father couldn’t help being the kind of man he was, and her mother had lived out her life alone. How much had her traumatic marriage to Jake Browne had to do with that?

“I want to take you to New Mexico sometime,” Ernie said a few minutes later, as they were riding over a back road toward Route 75. She was listening to him. It was just that she had burning eyes and a great lump in her throat she was going to have to do something about. “I’ve got some land around Chimayo. I want you to see it. I bought it when I was just a kid. See, when I get too slow to be a bull-dodging clown, what I want to do is live there and be a stockman for the rodeo. Anybody that’s looked as many ornery critters in the eye as I have won’t have any trouble picking them out to buy. I got some money put away. It shouldn’t take too long to get a good string of rank bulls and horses—Are you okay?” he asked abruptly.

“I’m okay,” she said, but she made the mistake of looking at him.

“Hannah, are you going to cry?”

“Yes, I think so,” she answered, giving a long, wavering sigh.

“Then slide over here and let me put my arm around you while you do it.”

She didn’t hesitate, and he held her close to him, not asking her any questions, just letting her use him as a crying towel if that was what she needed. It wasn’t for herself that she was crying; it was just that someone should mourn the agonizing demise of what might have been in her parents’ lives, and she was the only one to do it.

She sat up, wiping her eyes with a red bandanna Ernie gave her.

He reached out to run his hand over her hair. “You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

They rode for a time in silence, and he kept glancing at her.

“You want a Starlight Café hamburger?”

“No,” she said.

“Neon sign,” he reminded her.

“No,” she said again, knowing what he was doing. But she didn’t want to feel better just yet.

“I’m buying,” he threw in as a further enticement.

“No.”

“Ozelle might have her hair curlers out.”

“No,” she said, a smile working at the corner of her mouth. He was going to make her feel better in spite of herself.

“You want to get married?”

“N—what?”

“Do you want to get married?” he said distinctly. “To me,” he added. “After I’ve courted you so you’ll know I love you and I’m sure about it, and you’ll know you love me and you’re sure about it, and I’m back rodeoing and I’ve got some money coming in and—stuff like that.”

For once in her life, television experience or not, she was totally speechless.

“Now, look, Hannah. You know I don’t work up to things. I love you. Well, what did you think?” he said a bit testily. “We were going to live in sin?”

“It—occurred to me.”

He grinned. “It did?”

“Yes,” she said, shameless to a fault.

“Damn!” he said, clearly pleased. “Except that won’t work.”

“It won’t?” she said.

“No. When you come to Tahlequah with me at Christmastime, or when you go with me to New Mexico to see my godchildren or on the road buying rank bulls, or when you come to see me at the rodeo, I want to be able to say, ‘This is my wife’—even if you’ve got one of those dang Perry Mason suits on.”

“You do?” she said, staring straight ahead. This man was serious!

“And that’s not even mentioning when we get pregnant.”

She looked at him with such alarm that he suddenly pulled off the road by an abandoned roadside country store. The windows were boarded, and it was made of sagging, weathered wood and covered with rusty, illegible signs. The wind had picked up, and it buffeted the truck. Ernie reached for her, taking her into his arms and holding her close. She leaned into him, loving the feel of him, the way she always did.

“Hannah, whatever Jake said—it’s not something that’s going to hurt us, is it?”

She leaned back so she could see his eyes. “No. It’s nothing to do with us.”

He nodded, and he reached up to gently stroke her cheek with the backs of his fingers. He took her into his arms again, kissing her deeply, lovingly. “We’re a pair, Hannah Rose,” he said with a sigh.

She hugged him tightly and smiled, knowing the past was as abandoned as the old country store behind him. “You know what, Watson? I think maybe we are.”

EPILOGUE

H
ANNAH CAME STRAIGHT
from KHRB, arriving late and out of breath and just in time for the introduction. She hadn’t stopped to change clothes, and she was still wearing high-heeled shoes and a Perry Mason suit—red, but Perry Mason nevertheless.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the rodeo announcer, “welcome to Will Rogers Coliseum. While we’re waiting for the next event, I’d like to introduce one of our professional rodeo clowns. You’ve seen him out here working tonight—protecting the cowboys in these events. A fine athlete and gentleman—Mr. John Ernest Watson! Take a bow, Ernie!”

The spotlights came on in the middle of the arena, and Hannah couldn’t keep from grinning. She loved him in clown face—actually she loved him in any kind of face—but she especially loved his flagrantly corny rodeo routines. Ernie had on a big black hat and a black and white striped referee’s shirt and cut-off baggy jeans with black tights and knee-high black and yellow rugby socks and orange Day-Glo suspenders. He had red and blue bandannas pinned up one corner all around his waist, and he was the most beautiful thing Hannah had ever seen. She moved closer to the front to get a better look, parting a group of cowboys who seemed unusually happy to see her.

“So, Ernie! Tell us how you’ve been doing!” the rodeo announcer said.

Ernie took his hat off and held it over his heart. “Not so good, Red!” He picked up one corner of a bandanna and carefully wiped his eyes.

“Why, Ernie, what’s the matter, son?”

He blew his nose loudly, then announced: “My wife died!”

“She died! Ernie! We’re sorry to hear that! What in the world happened to her!”

“Poison mushrooms!”

“Poison mushrooms! Ernie, that’s awful! I’m really sorry!”

Ernie put his hat back on and let go of his bandanna. “Naw, that’s all right, Red!”

“That’s all right!”

“Yeah, that’s all right. I got married again!”

“You got married again?”

“Yeah, I got married again!”