Sweet Water (2 page)

Marisa had tamped down and dammed up so many emotions, sometimes she thought her skull might explode, yet, as she did a dozen times a day, she fought back her grief and frustration and took her time helping her mother eat, chatting along about this and that.

Changing the subject from Mama’s past wasn’t hard, as her ability to concentrate on anything for longer than minutes had been gone a while. Lately even companionship meant little to her. None of that mattered now. No one had given more love or care to her friends and acquaintances, or to Marisa, than her mother. Nothing, not even eviction from Pecos Belle’s, would keep Raylene Rutherford’s daughter from making sure her beloved parent spent her last days with a roof over her head, good food in her belly and love surrounding her.

After supper Marisa removed the yarn from her mother’s hair, helped her bathe and get into her nightgown. She had her swallow the pill she had brought from the medicine cabinet in Pecos Belle’s. What good the drug did Marisa couldn’t tell. She didn’t know its exact purpose in the first place, but it always put Mama down for the night. According to the doctor, that was good. The last thing anyone wanted was for Mama to be up wandering during the night. Science’s best solution appeared to be to zonk her with drugs.

Marisa waited for her charge to grow drowsy, then helped her to the bed. The crinkly eyelids fluttered shut and Marisa held her mother’s hand for a time, studying the papery skin, the distinct blue veins that carried her lifeblood. Her hand looked like an elderly woman’s hand. Raylene Rutherford was sixty-six years old. Marisa had been born a bastard when her mother was thirty-two, old enough to know how to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. Marisa longed to know her mother’s story, but no one had ever told her. Through the years, only bits and pieces had been dropped by her aunts.

Once again, so as not to be immobilized by her emotions, Marisa pushed them to a dark place deep in her psyche.

Chapter 2

The black of night was fading to daylight’s soft gray as Terry Ledger plugged his key into the front door of his twelfth floor condominium in The Tower in downtown Fort Worth. He hated dragging in at this hour. He should have come home last night after dinner, shouldn’t have stayed the night at Michelle’s.

As he stepped into the entry, the clean smell of lemon oil met him, proof his housekeeper Irene Mendoza had been on the scene. To his left the muted glow of streetlights beaming through bare windows dimly lit the rectangle that was the living room. Its bare maple floors and stark white walls reminded him of a racquet ball court. He dropped his truck keys in a heavy art glass bowl on a massive harvest table in the entryway, made a right turn into the high-ceilinged white kitchen and put coffee on to drip.

While waiting for the eye-opening brew, he walked back to the living room, his footsteps echoing through the almost-empty space. His few pieces of living room furniture were mostly mismatched castoffs from dozens of model home showings across the Fort Worth/Dallas area. His plants were artificial. The condo’s only window treatments--they had come from the shelves of Walmart--didn’t hang in the living room, but served to provide privacy in his bedroom.

To a successful homebuilder with his schedule, his condo décor meant next to nothing. He was asleep most of the time he spent here. His only requirement was that the place be meticulously clean, kept that way by Irene who came in every day except on weekends. For as long as he could remember he had been a stickler for cleanliness, but he had become a regular martinet after a six-year hitch in the army and three years in and out of Middle Eastern squalor.

Despite the lack of furniture and décor, his digs weren’t shabby. The condo was located in what had been the Bank One building before a tornado crashed through downtown Fort Worth, took out more than half the skyscraper’s glass and destroyed the interior. What had once been luxury offices was now luxury living spaces, remodeled and renamed. Downtown living wasn’t his style, but getting in on the ground floor when The Tower opened for occupancy made the condo an outstanding investment.

He liked owning a little part of downtown Fort Worth. The city was in the midst of a revival and he liked being on the scene to watch the transformation. As much as he loved everything about the construction of something new, he loved the reconstruction of something old.

He also loved progress, He was filled with awe and admiration at all the wealthy Bass and Tandy families had accomplished. They had methodically restored the old areas that had fallen into decay after the flight to the suburbs of businesses and retail stores. They had built a concert hall and a mega movie theatre and remodeled any number of historic buildings. Other entrepreneurs had followed, adding shopping and museums, opening high-caliber restaurants and trendy nightclubs. Downtown Fort Worth now surpassed Dallas as a happening place for a fun night out.

Now, as
 
he
 
gazed
 
out
 
his
 
wall-to-wall windows over the awakening city, the lights still visible were mostly nightlights casting the streets and buildings in a dull pinkish gold. Few human beings were awake at this hour, much less walking the sidewalks. The only sign of life was a pair of private cops on bicycles. A stillness hung in the air as if the city waited to burst into action at the first pink shard of daylight.

Last night’s awkward conversation with Michelle intruded into his thoughts. It had been all about commitment and his lack thereof. They had eaten a delicious quail dinner and downed a bottle of good wine at Reata, then gone to her apartment in West Fort Worth for dessert--a session of blood-boiling sex.

Afterward, as they shared yet another glass of wine, she laid out a plan for a four-three-two house in a bedroom community within commuting distance to her downtown office. Her scenario included a nanny to care for the two kids they would have while she worked toward a partnership in the firm where she practiced personal injury law.

Knowing her lofty ambitions, Terry was surprised that institutions as mundane as matrimony and motherhood interested her. Unfortunately, sharing those two life steps with Michelle didn’t interest him. Her true loyalty lay with who could do the most for her and too often, her sharp tongue or her self-centered attitude reminded him too much of his mother. Terry couldn’t wrap his mind around playing the role with any woman he had now watched four men play with his mom.

Still, he didn’t mind Michelle’s company. Oh, sure, she was argumentative and did have to have the last word in any conversation, but she was witty and quick with a quip, thus entertaining. She was a head-turner in the looks department. And she was an animal in bed, as was he. Before knowing her, he thought he knew most of what there was to know about sex, but she had taught him a few new tricks. He had never asked where she learned them, didn’t care. From the beginning of their affair he had suspected he wasn’t her only sex partner, though he was certain she would deny that.

For the six months they had been seeing each other, he thought sex was what their relationship was about. The L-word had never been uttered, nor had the C-word. Then, wham! Last night, after more merlot than either of them needed, she brought up children and family and insisted on a discussion. He felt as if he had been ambushed. Marriage was the farthest thing from his mind. And living in a suburb, even in a sub-division he had designed and developed, held less appeal than watching a freight truck unload.

He tried to be kind, tried to say gently that if and when he chose a woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life, one who would be the mother of his children, the same woman would most likely be a stay-at-home mom. If he ever had a family--and at age thirty-six, he had begun to wonder--no nanny or babysitter would raise his kids.

Chauvinistic? Perhaps. He had been labeled as such by the fairer sex more times than he could count and he had no intention of changing. He had been reared by babysitters himself while his parents pursued their respective careers. His mother was a trial attorney who had usually shown more concern for her cases than her family. His dad, a consulting petroleum engineer, traveled the world.

He remembered the loneliness of being the only kid with no parent present at a Pop Warner game, the embarrassment of parent-teacher conference week with no parent available to participate, being handed a hundred dollar bill and told to choose his own athletic shoes because no one had time to take him shopping.

Even now, he didn’t know exactly where on the planet his parents might be. His dad could be somewhere in the Middle East, or perhaps Indonesia. His mother, the last he had heard, was in California, honeymooning with her fourth husband, no doubt already arguing talking points with the poor bastard, just as she had done with her first husband and her succeeding husbands. And her son.

The previous evening still on his mind and his conscience, he returned to the kitchen, poured a cup of Joe and made his way to the master suite. Michelle had ended up in tears, which was why he ended up spending the night at her apartment. Leaving with her so upset felt too callous. No question, he was a soft touch for a woman in tears.

He stayed over, then got the hell out early this morning while she slept. Not the most chivalrous move he had ever made, but, under the circumstances, the easiest and most surgical. With a busy and exciting day ahead of him, he did not--repeat, did not--want to be distracted by another session of her weeping and him tactfully trying to explain that as far as he was concerned, the feminist idea of a woman “having it all” was hogwash.

He clicked on the TV as he strode through the huge master bedroom on his way to the bathroom. The news came on with headlines. Mortgage interest low, new home starts up. Good news for a man who owed over a million dollars in mortgage debt and had fifty spec homes on the ground in various stages of completion.

Inside the bathroom, as he brushed his teeth and shaved, he planned his day. This morning he would meet his engineer, Brad England, at a new sub-division site he had bought at a distress price fifty miles southwest of Fort Worth. The roughly two thousand acres were incredibly beautiful, with gently rolling hills, groves of hundred-year-old live oak trees and a huge stock tank with the potential to be expanded into a small lake.

He and Brad were in the process of carving and shaping the old ranch into ten-to-twenty-acre parcels. It would become Rancho Casero, a sub-division and gated horse community. There would be stables and an arena for playdays and cutting horse events, a clubhouse and pool and a restaurant that would be planned and operated by a chef well-known for his Tex-Mex cuisine. Buyers were already migrating out of Fort Worth and Dallas and laying down premium prices to own an elegant little piece of western style country living.

His construction company, Terry Ledger Homes, had already begun construction of upscale Santa Fe style houses in which commuters and still more retiring baby-boomers would live. The population of well-heeled retirees would patronize his restaurant. His profit would be enormous. He knew all of this from having already done it several times.

He entered his marble walk-in shower and turned on the radio he kept on a shelf inside the shower. He shampooed his hair while one part of his brain listened to local news and weather and another part thought beyond his meeting with his engineer. He would be finished by noon, then he would head west to the most exciting real estate buy he had ever made. His pragmatic persona shuddered at the gamble he had taken; his risk-taker side, the one that lived to skydive or hang glide or jetski at full throttle across a Texas lake at daylight, the one that usually won out, cheered him on.

It was the risk-taker side that had made him rich.

It was the risk-taker side that had been in charge when, just four days ago, he had purchased a town in West Texas, site unseen, on eBay.

Now, as he soaped and rinsed his body, exhilaration thrummed within him. He could hardly wait to get to his town. He had wanted to return to West Texas since his discharge from the army. For several years, Ledger Ranches, a retirement community on the order of Sun City, had been on the drawing board, waiting for him to find just the right location. He believed his quest had ended. Both desires could now be met. A hamlet with good water and two hundred acres adjoining a cattle ranch on one side, which, he had learned from one of his fellow Realtors in Odessa, could be bought.

He stepped out of the shower less than fifteen minutes later. Time was money. He rarely wasted either. Finger combing and drying his hair in front of the vanity mirror, something caught his eye. When had the hair at his temples turned silver?

He stopped for a few seconds and looked closer, noting the creases in his forehead, the crow’s feet fanning from the corners of his eyes, the lines framing his mouth. He clenched his jaw against one of his deepest dreads—growing old or dying before he completed his many plans.

He shook his head, driving away the disquieting thought.

He carried an extra toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo and shaving gear back to the bedroom and stuffed them into a small nylon duffle. He pulled on clean jeans, a long-sleeved knit shirt and his heavy biker boots, then crammed half a dozen changes of socks and boxers, jeans and shirts, sweats, his cowboy boots and his Nikes into the duffle. He was packed.

By the time the sky turned lavender, he stood perusing the nearly bare shelves of his refrigerator. He pulled out a Styrofoam takeout box and found half of a beef and bean burrito, which he zapped for thirty seconds in the microwave. It tasted like plywood, but he didn’t worry over little things like taste and texture. Food was sustenance, nothing more. During survival training in the army, he had eaten the unthinkable. He washed the burrito down with coffee, quelling the empty feeling left in his gut by too much vino last night.