The Marriage Charm (Bliss County 2) (32 page)

These days, evidently, it sucked to be Oakley.

And that was fine with Tripp. What
wasn’t
fine, then or now, was seeing Hadleigh hurt so badly, knowing he’d personally broken her heart, however good his intentions might have been. Knowing she’d never found what she really wanted, what she’d wanted from the time she was a little girl: a home and family, the traditional kind comprising a husband, a wife, 2.5 children and some pets.

A light, dust-settling drizzle began just then, reflecting his mood—the weather could change quickly in Wyoming—as they were passing the town limits, only ten miles or so from the ranch, and Tripp eased his foot down on the gas pedal, eager to get there.

As the rig picked up speed, Ridley let it be known that he’d appreciate another opportunity to stick his head out into the wind, rain or no rain.

*

R
AIN.

Well, Hadleigh Stevens thought philosophically, the farmers and ranchers would certainly appreciate it, even if she didn’t.

Such weather made some people feel downright cozy; they’d brew some tea and light a cheery blaze in the fireplace and swap out their shoes for comfortable slippers. But it always saddened Hadleigh a little when the sky clouded over and the storm began, be it drizzle or downpour.

It had been raining that long-ago afternoon when her grandmother had shown up at school, her face creased with grief, to collect Hadleigh, saying not a word. They’d gone on, in Gram’s old station wagon, to pick up Will. He was waiting out in front of the junior high building, pale and seemingly heedless of the downpour. Being seven years older than Hadleigh, he’d known what she hadn’t—that both their parents had died in a car crash just hours before, outside Laramie.

It rained the day of their mom and dad’s joint funeral and again a few years later, when Hadleigh and her grandmother got word that Will had died as a result of wounds received during a roadside bombing in Afghanistan.

And when Gram had passed away, after a long illness, the skies had been gray and umbrellas had sprouted everywhere, like colorful mushrooms.

Today, Hadleigh had tried to shake off the mood by her usual method—keeping busy.

She’d closed Patches, the quilting shop she’d inherited from her grandmother, at noon; her two closest friends were coming over that evening, on serious business. The modest house was neat and tidy. She’d vacuumed and dusted and polished for an hour after lunch, but there was still plenty to do, like have a shower, do something with her hair and bake a cake for dessert.

She was taking one last narrow-eyed look around the living room, making sure everything was as it should be, when she heard the familiar whimper outside on the porch, followed by persistent scratching at the screen door.

Muggles was back.

Hadleigh hurried to open up, and her heart went out to the soggy golden retriever sitting forlornly on her welcome mat, brown eyes luminous and hopeful and apologetically miserable, all at once.

“Hey, Mugs,” Hadleigh said with a welcoming smile. She unlatched the screen door and stepped back to admit the neighbor’s dog. “What’s up?”

Muggles crossed the threshold slowly, stood dripping on the colorful hooked rug in the small foyer, and gazed up at Hadleigh again, bereft.

“It’s okay,” Hadleigh assured her visitor, bending to pat the critter’s head. “You just sit tight, and I’ll get you a nice, fluffy towel. Then you can have something to eat and curl up in front of the fire.”

Obediently, Muggles dropped onto her haunches, rainwater puddling all around her.

Hadleigh rushed into the downstairs bathroom—Gram had always called it “the powder room”—and snatched a blue towel off the rack between the sink and the toilet.

After returning to the foyer, she crouched to bundle Muggles in the towel, draping it around those shivering shoulders, drying the animal’s grubby coat as gently as she could.

“Now for some food,” she said when Muggles was as clean as could be expected, without an actual tub bath or a thorough hosing-down. “Follow me.”

Muggles wagged her plumy tail once and rose from the rug.

The poor thing smelled like—well, a wet dog—and clumps of mud still clung to her fur, but it didn’t occur to Hadleigh to fret about her clean carpets and just-washed floors.

Reaching the kitchen, which was pleasantly outdated like the rest of the house, Hadleigh made her way to the pantry and found the plastic bowls she’d bought especially for Muggles, who’d been a frequent visitor over the three months since her doting mistress, Eula Rollins, had passed away. Eula’s husband, Earl, was elderly, grieving the loss of the wife he’d adored, and in frail health besides. While Earl certainly wasn’t an unkind person, he understandably tended to forget certain things—like letting the dog back inside after she’d gone out.

That was why Hadleigh kept a fifty-pound sack of kibble on the screened-in back porch and a stash of old blankets in the hall closet, for those times when Muggles needed water, a meal and a place to crash.

At the sink, she filled one of the bowls with water and set it down nearby. While Muggles drank thirstily, Hadleigh zipped out onto the porch to scoop up a generous portion of kibble.

As Muggles munched away on her supper, Hadleigh fetched the blankets from the closet in the hall and arranged them carefully in front of the pellet stove in the corner of the kitchen. The moment she’d eaten her fill, the animal ambled wearily over to the improvised dog bed, circled a few times and lay down to sleep.

Hadleigh sighed. Like most of the other women in the neighborhood, she’d taken her turn looking in on Earl, bringing over a casserole now and then or a freshly baked pie, picking up his medicine at the pharmacy, carrying in his newspaper and his mail. Before each visit, she’d made up her mind to speak to the old man about Muggles, very gently of course, but once she’d crossed the street and knocked on the familiar door and he’d let her in, his loneliness and despair so poignantly evident that she felt bruised herself, she always seemed to lose whatever momentum she’d managed to drum up.

Another time,
she’d tell herself guiltily.
I’ll make my pitch to adopt Muggles tomorrow or the next day. Earl
loves
this dog. And she’s all he has left of Eula, besides a lot of bittersweet memories, this old house and its overabundance of knickknacks.

Well,
she thought now with another sigh, the rain beating down hard on the roof over her head,
maybe “another time” has finally come.
However much she sympathized with Earl, and that was a great deal, since she’d grown up knowing him and Eula, somebody had to step up and
do
something about the situation. Muggles couldn’t speak for herself, after all. So Hadleigh was stuck.

Decision made, Hadleigh took her hooded jacket from the row of pegs on the back porch—she had to rummage for it, since Gram’s coats were still hanging there, along with a tattered denim jacket that had belonged to her dad and then to Will.

Her throat thickened, and she touched one of the sleeves, worn soft at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs. For a moment, she allowed herself to remember both men, and then, because she had a clearer picture of Will, she recalled the sound of his laugh, the way he always slammed the screen door coming in or going out, accompanied by Gram’s good-natured fussing.

Like many kid sisters, Hadleigh had idolized her big brother. She’d accepted his loss, she supposed, but she still wasn’t reconciled to the unfairness of it. He’d been so young when he was killed, full of promise and energy and idealism, and he’d never gotten the chance to chase his own dreams.

For several years, the scent of Will’s aftershave had clung to the fabric of that jacket, along with a tinge of woodsmoke, but now the garment had a dank, rainy-day smell, faintly musty, like an old sleeping bag somebody had rolled up, put away in an attic or a basement and forgotten.

Get a grip,
Hadleigh told herself when sadness threatened to overwhelm her.
Think about
right now,
because that’s what matters.

Resolutely, she raised the hood of her jacket, tugged the drawstrings tight around her face and marched out into the rain.

Hands jammed into her pockets, head lowered slightly against the continuing downpour, Hadleigh followed the concrete walkway that ran alongside the house, past the flower beds and the familiar windows, silently going over the things she might say to Earl when he opened his door—and discarding each one in turn.

Everything sounded so...patronizing. How could she tell this good man that he was too old and too sick to take proper care of his own dog? Earl Rollins had worked hard all his life, been active in his church and in the rest of the community, and he’d already lost not only his professional identity and the ordinary freedoms younger people took for granted, such as a driver’s license. He’d lost Eula, his soul mate, too.

Still, there was Muggles, a living, breathing creature who needed food, shelter and love.

Torn between responsibility and sentiment, Hadleigh forged on, reached her front yard and came to a sudden, startled stop in the soggy grass.

An ambulance was just pulling into the Rollinses’ driveway, lights flashing.

Hadleigh peered both ways and then splashed across the street, her heart wedging itself in her throat.

Another neighbor, Mrs. Culpepper, stood in Earl’s doorway, gesturing anxiously for the paramedics to hurry.

They parked the ambulance, circled to the back of the vehicle and opened the doors to pull out a collapsible gurney.

“Quickly,” Mrs. Culpepper pleaded.

Hadleigh must have read the woman’s lips, because the pounding rain, crackling like fire on roofs and sidewalks and asphalt, made it impossible to hear.

The EMTs moved past Mrs. Culpepper swiftly, disappearing inside the house.

Hadleigh hurried over to the porch. She didn’t want to get in the way, but she needed to know what was happening.

Mrs. Culpepper, after directing the paramedics to the kitchen in a shrill and tremulous voice, turned to meet Hadleigh’s gaze.

“This is terrible,” the older woman moaned.

Hadleigh felt an unbecoming—her grandmother’s word,
unbecoming
—rush of impatience, which she stifled quickly. Mrs. Culpepper, though long retired, had been her first-grade teacher and, like Earl and Eula, she was as much a part of Mustang Creek, Wyoming, as the landscape.

So Hadleigh waited politely for more information.

“I came over to check on Earl,” Mrs. Culpepper said, after some swallowing and fluttering of one hand, as though fanning herself on a hot day. “I realized I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since Tuesday. Lucky thing he never locks his doors. Eula didn’t either, even back in the day, when Earl was on the road so much because of his work. Anyhow, when nobody answered my knock—I called out a couple of times, too—I let myself in and there he was, just lying there on the kitchen floor, his eyes wide-open, staring at me. I could see what a struggle it was for him to speak...” She paused to draw a wavery breath. “I called nine-one-one right away, and then I knelt beside poor Earl and bent down, trying to hear what he was saying.”

Hadleigh rested a hand on Mrs. Culpepper’s bird-boned shoulder. “Maybe you should sit down,” she said, worried by the papery pallor in the lady’s face and the tremor in her voice.

But Mrs. Culpepper shook her head. “No, no,” she protested distractedly. “I’m fine, dear.” Another indrawn breath, this one raspy and shallow. “When I finally managed to make out what Earl was trying to tell me, this old heart of mine just cracked right down the middle. Sick as he is, that man was fretting over the dog. Wanted to know who’d take care of it.”

Hadleigh’s eyes welled with tears—she’d been right; Earl did love Muggles. But before she could formulate a reply, she saw the paramedics emerging from the kitchen, the gurney between them, Earl lying shrunken and gray under a hospital blanket, eyes closed.

Hadleigh stepped into the tiny foyer then, easing Mrs. Culpepper to one side, so the EMTs could pass, then hurrying to catch up. Stepping alongside the gurney, she managed to grasp one of Earl’s hands.

His flesh felt cold and dry against her palm and fingers.

“Don’t worry,” she said, raising her voice, the rain pelting down on all of them. “Do you hear me, Earl?
Don’t worry
about Muggles. She’s at my house right now, and I promise I’ll look after her for as long as necessary!”

Remarkably, Earl opened his eyes, blinking in the rain. He smiled, ever so tentatively, and his lips formed the words, “Thank you.”

“Step aside, please, ma’am,” one of the paramedics ordered, his tone and manner brisk but still polite.

Hadleigh moved out of the way and stood in the wet grass of Earl’s front lawn, watching as the EMTs deftly folded the gurney’s legs, then slid the patient inside. One of the men climbed in beside Earl, while the other secured the ambulance doors and then jogged around to get behind the wheel.

Seconds later, the vehicle sped away.

Dazed, Hadleigh nonetheless had the presence of mind to cross the street again, back her dilapidated, wood-paneled station wagon out of the garage and drive Mrs. Culpepper home. She lived close by, just around the block, as she pointed out, but the rain wasn’t letting up and one neighbor headed for the hospital was, Hadleigh felt, quite enough.

Once she’d delivered Mrs. Culpepper to her door, Hadleigh dashed back to the car and headed for her own place.

As she drove, she thought about Will, and how proud he’d been of that ancient station wagon. He’d insisted it was a classic and planned to restore it to its original glory as soon as he’d finished his hitch in the air force and came home to Mustang Creek.

In the end, he’d come home, all right—in a flag-draped coffin, with a bleak-eyed Tripp Galloway and two other uniformed soldiers serving as escorts.

Tripp Galloway.

Just
thinking
about the man still raised her hackles, but on this dreary, gray-skied afternoon, even the rush of acidic irritation came as a welcome distraction.