The Loves of Ruby Dee (2 page)

“I like Dr. Pepper just fine.” Her face was solemn as a judge’s, her brown eyes looking straight at his.

Will said, “Lonnie will get our drinks,” and gestured toward the alcove on his right and stepped aside. “My office is through here.” Lonnie was coming from the refrigerator, three cans in hand. “Put those Dr. Peppers in glasses, Lonnie. With ice,” Will said, and turned to follow the girl through the small alcove and the open door. He pushed the door closed behind him.

The office had been made by enclosing the side porch some fifteen years ago, when the old man had dumped the management of the ranch into Will’s lap. That was the same year the IRS had come after them because the old man’s record system had consisted of scraps of paper, half of them torn from napkins, tucked into a small envelope. These days Will managed with the help of a computer. Lonnie served as his top hand, when he wasn’t off playing the rodeos and the girls. But Hardy Starr still owned the Starr Ranch, and he never let anyone forget it. For their work, Will and Lonnie got a salary, just like the other hands.

The only thing that kept the office from being as drab as the kitchen was the books and magazines that crammed it. This was Will’s domain. Sometimes the old man came in and wanted to see the accounts, acting like he knew what he was looking at, and once in awhile Lonnie poked his head in for a chat, or to bum a ten, but mostly Will was in here alone. He liked it that way. Here he kept a couple of his antique bridles and bits, and he had pictures scattered around, shots of the ranch’s top bulls and Will’s best horses, with their ribbons and trophies. None of them were more recent than five years ago, though. He had seemed to lose interest in all of these things over the past few years. These days, sometimes he had trouble calling up enough interest in anything just to get out of bed.

Miss D’Angelo glanced around the room, then slowly brought her hand to the crown of her hat. The fabric of her dress stretched tight over her breasts for an instant. Will saw beads of moisture on her pale skin, where it dipped between her breasts. She slipped off the hat and raked her fingers through her hair. It was wavy, and it fell from her fingers like dark honey rippling in sunshine. She let her hand drop as if it were heavy. All of her movements were like that, slow and heavy and languid.

Will wondered how she would be in bed. Then he snatched off his own hat and tossed it to the desk.

It gave up a little puff of dust. He, too, raked his hands through his hair. It was soaked with sweat, and so was his shirt. Sweat, around the gal, seemed in poor taste.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go wash up. Just sit down, if you’d like. Lonnie’ll have the drinks in a minute.”

He went back through the door and pulled it closed behind him. It had not been this awkward when he’d hired the four other housekeepers, he thought. Of course, none of those housekeepers had been like this gal.

Each of the previous housekeepers had been on the far side of fifty and quite substantial in frame, and one of them had been a man. One of them, the second one, had been almost a man, and Will had had high hopes for her. She had been a solid chunk of a commander in Big Smith overalls. She hadn’t been much for cleaning, but she could flat-out cook, and she’d matched Hardy curse for curse and chew for chew. The old man had been sufficiently impressed by her size not to threaten her physically. But one afternoon he had found a girlie calendar from somewhere and waved it in her face. He had actually chased her with it out across the yard, no mean trick for a man with a cane.

Ruby Dee D’Angelo, Will thought, was more like the girl on the girlie calendar than a housekeeper.

“Did you know we don’t have any matchin’ glasses in this house?” Lonnie said. He had two glasses on the counter, filling them with soft drink while he sipped beer foam from a third.

Will stripped out of his shirt, threw it on top of the washer and stepped to the sink, then stuck his hands and arms under the faucet flow. Lonnie poked at an ice cube in one of the glasses.

“I hope you washed your hands,” Will told him.

“I washed my hands. I’m not a heathen. No matter that I live like one half the time, with nothin’ but jelly glasses to drink out of. It seems like people who have two pickup trucks worth thirty grand plus apiece in the garage and are sellin’ some bulls for ten grand apiece could at least afford matching glasses.”

“What we don’t have is time and inclination,” Will said. “Shit! We don’t have soap, either.” He pumped the silly little plastic bottle furiously, but all it did was spit at him. “Squirt me some of that dish soap, Lon.”

“Well, when the gal goes for groceries, you tell her to get some glasses, too,” Lonnie said, squirting the green liquid into Will’s palm. “It’s embarrassin’ having to use jelly glasses when people come by.”

"Yeah...and how often do people come by?”

People weren’t given to visiting the Starrs. Once in awhile a couple of Lonnie’s buddies would show up, but they always hung around out at the arena. Will couldn’t be called a socializer, and if the old man had anything at all to say to anyone, it wasn’t good.

Will worked up suds, and the water ran dark. He stuck his head down and rinsed his face, threw water on the back of his neck. Lonnie handed him the towel, and he dried his face vigorously.

“Miss D’Angelo isn’t gonna have time to do any shoppin’. She isn’t stayin’.”

Will said it straight, going on the supposition that the sooner dealt with, the sooner done with. When he looked up, his brother was staring at him.

“You’re not even gonna give her a try, are you? You get one look at her, and you make up your mind to that.” Lonnie shook his head angrily. “I told you that you should have gone down and interviewed her yourself in Okie City. It makes damn little sense to bring her all the way up here for nothin’. That isn’t a nice thing to do at all,” he added righteously, which was pretty silly. Lonnie threw around righteousness the way some people did their socks, using it when it suited him.

“She came up here on provision, and she’s been well paid for her time and trouble,” was Will’s answer as he finished drying his hands and arms. “Besides, I interviewed the four before her, and none of them turned out to be what we hoped when they got on the job. I didn’t have time to go chasin’ down to Oklahoma City on a fool’s errand. There’s a ranch to run, and the old man to see to.”

“Meanin’ I can’t do either, right?” Lonnie said, peeved.

“No. Mostly what it is, is that you don’t
want
to do either.”

That truth sat there a loud second.

“You just don’t like to leave this ranch anymore, is what it is,” Lonnie said, pointing at Will. “You’ve gotten to be like an old woman that won’t let go.”

They stared at each other, the barbs they had slung echoing in the angry silence that followed.

“I guess we’re both doin’ the best we can,” Will said flatly, and turned on his heel.

He went to the back porch, where the shirts he’d brought home from the laundry still hung from the ceiling hook. He tore off the plastic wrapping and jerked a shirt off the hanger, then slipped into it. The damn cuff was ragged. He rolled it up.

Lonnie leaned against the counter, sipping his beer. “The old man has run off four housekeepers in the past five months.” His gaze said he held Will to account for it.

Will said, “He run off three. I ran off the last one.” The last one had been the male housekeeper, the great idea that had turned bad. The man had liked to sleep half the day and smoke smelly cigars the other half, and when Will had caught him stealing from the kitchen money to play poker with old buddies who suddenly started dropping by, he had sent him on his way.

Lonnie sighed heavily. “Look, Will, if you’re upset by the way I was playin’ with the gal, you got the wrong idea. I’m just like that with women. It doesn’t mean anything, and you ought to know that by now. Let her stay until the old man runs her off, so we can at least get one or two good meals. It wouldn’t hurt to come in here and see a face prettier than yours, either, and I don’t think I need to feel ashamed of that.”

Will shook his head as he buttoned his shirt. “I know, Lon. I’m damn tired of cold food and dirty laundry and tryin’ to keep the old man from killing himself, just as much as you are. But look at her. She’s...” He gestured toward the office, unable to find words for what he wanted to say. “It’s a cinch the old man would chew her up and spit her out in all of five seconds, Lon.”

That familiar stubborn look came over his brother’s face. “Maybe she looks tender, but that sure is a refreshing change from those you’ve been gettin’ in here. She’s a woman who happens to look and act like one.”

Will clamped his mouth shut at that.

“Aw, Will, face it. Nobody you get in here is gonna change the facts. The old man is mean as a junkyard dog, and always has been. Mama left because of it. And now he’s eighty-five, has diabetes and is off the beam from his stroke. He ain’t likely to get better, and he’ll have us all sick and crazy before he’s through. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have to live this way. He keeps the hands run off and us tied here, same as if we had a rope around our necks.”

“Mama left because she got a boyfriend,” Will said, jerking up his zipper and fastening his belt. “And I hadn’t noticed you keepin’ yourself from going off to your rodeos and women. When did that happen?”

Lonnie said, “I’m here now, and it sure ain’t because I couldn’t be off workin’ somewhere else.” He poked his finger at Will. “I work this ranch, same as you. I’ve given half my life to it, and I’m damn tired of being treated like nothin’ but a no-account hand that the old man can’t even stomach lookin’ at. I’ve had it, Will.”

Looking at Lonnie’s flushed and furious face, Will swallowed and clenched and unclenched his hands. He wanted to take off right then, head out and never look back. But Lonnie was his brother and the old man was his dad, and somehow Will had to keep them all together. That had been his responsibility for twenty-five years, to keep them together. God, he was damned tired of the load.

He breathed deeply and said, “Aw, Lon, the old man—”

Suddenly he saw the girl. She stepped out from the entry to the office and stood gazing at him with her big brown eyes.

Embarrassment washed over him. He and Lonnie hadn’t been yelling, but Will wondered how much she had heard. Her dark eyes went from him to Lonnie and came back to rest on him. They were totally unreadable.

“Could I use y’all’s bathroom?”

It was Lonnie who jumped to show her, with the dog at her heels, the way. And as she followed his brother through the archway to the dining room, Will gazed at the girl and thought how there had not been a pretty young woman in this house since the day his mother had left, twenty-five years ago.

There never had been a dog.

Chapter 2

Ruby Dee regretted
having to interrupt the brothers’ conversation, it being neither polite nor prudent to interrupt an argument. But she had been about to ask for the bathroom before Will Starr had raced off and left her in his office, and now she was about to pee her pants.

Lonnie Starr was just as sweet as he could be, showing her through the dining room and into the hallway to the bathroom. He was a man at ease with women. The other one, Will Starr, was not.

She had not needed to hear what Will Starr said in the kitchen to know that he did not want her here—and with her ear pressed to the door, she had heard almost every word. She had known it, though, from the first sight of him walking across to greet her. Disapproval had been all over him like a wash of paint.

Oh, he was attracted to her. She had seen that, too. Felt it in a vibration, as well as caught it in a glimmer of his blue eyes, before he’d hidden it. Ruby Dee was good at reading people. And men always seemed attracted to her. A lot of them seemed to disapprove of
her, too. Miss Edna had always said Ruby Dee frightened men, said that they were put off by the way she met their gazes with her own and didn’t pretend to not know what was going on. Ruby Dee just didn’t know how else she was supposed to be. She was who she was, and didn’t see any need to hide it.

“Well,” she said in a shaky whisper, and then she began to cry.

Sally nudged her knee with a cold nose, offering consolation—and seeking it, too. Border collies were possessed of a nervous disposition, and when Ruby Dee got shook up, Sally did, too, no doubt recalling when she had been lost at the 7-Eleven and the dog catcher was trying to get her.

Ruby Dee flushed the toilet and turned on the water in the sink, then sank down onto the side of the tub—and boy, that tub needed scrubbing—and cried into the dingy hand towel, the only one that had been hanging on the towel rod. Judging from the towel and the tub, the water was hard, and they needed to add baking soda to their wash water.

That was what tears were to Ruby Dee—wash water, as good at cleansing hurts from the spirit as a bath was for dirt from the body. It was Ruby Dee’s opinion that crying was a necessity for good health too much neglected by people. Most people were ashamed of crying, as if it were a weakness, but to Ruby Dee there was no more shame to be found in crying than there was in taking a shower or a teaspoonful of cod liver oil. All three things were healing to a body.

Healing was Ruby Dee’s calling. She was by license a practical nurse, but she considered herself a healer, which in her estimation stood a lot higher than a nurse or a doctor. Nurses and doctors could be trained, as far as it went, but a healer was one who had received a special talent directly from God. Indeed, Miss Edna had said that Ruby Dee was next to God in bringing living things back from the brink of death and comforting those who were slipping over. Her exceptional abilities in this direction kept her almost constantly employed in private home care.

“Oh, Miss Edna,” Ruby Dee whispered into the dingy towel. “What am I gonna do now? I’ve driven all this way, and he disapproves of me, and I’m so tired.” Ruby Dee sank into her melancholy like a pebble tossed into cream gravy.

The next instant Ruby Dee heard Miss Edna’s familiar
“Straighten up!”