The Ranch She Left Behind (14 page)

Penny answered almost immediately, and it was clear she’d still been up and wide-awake. She wore the same loose, lacy shirt and formfitting blue jeans that had driven him crazy earlier today. She might have the face of a china doll, too sweet and perfect to be real under that fall of honey-brown hair. But her body was 100 percent real-flesh woman.

And, given that he’d sworn that for the next nine months he’d be 100 percent pure father—with nothing set aside for personal things, like sex and dating—that was a lot more woman than he needed right now.

But he had to thank her for today. She’d been unbelievably competent and compassionate.

In fact, she’d been the kind of mother Ellen should have had. How different might things have been, he thought, if he’d waited for a woman like this one?

“Hi,” he said. “Sorry to bother you so late. I just wanted to thank you for all your help today. You were terrific.”

“It was nothing.” She smiled. “And I didn’t even realize it was late. I was still up. Still unpacking. It’s such a mess, moving in, isn’t it?”

He nodded with feeling. But, judging from what he could see over her shoulder, her place didn’t look half as chaotic as his. He still had boxes everywhere, and he hadn’t even brought any furniture or large items. She’d had only a few days to start from scratch, and everything he could see looked fully finished.

Simple and spare, lots of blues and browns and clean, creamy white. Elegant and welcoming. Flowers on the kitchen table, and beyond that, lamps and armchairs and a colorful braided rug in the living room.

And, on every wall, framed paintings—beautiful landscapes that looked like original artwork. Wildflowers and mountains that could easily have been Silverdell itself.

She glanced toward his side of the duplex. “How’s Ellen?”

“She’s all right, thanks to your TLC. I don’t know how you got her to come out and face Rowena. She usually gets stubborn and defensive.”

She smiled. “Appealed to her sense of pride, mostly. It’s a technique I learned with Rowena, when we were kids. When she felt bullied or threatened, she covered up by being haughty, or lashing out preemptively. So we all learned to come at her sideways.”

He shook his head, thinking how sad it was that Penny, at ten or eleven, had been defter with a difficult personality than he was at thirty-four.

“I wish you’d been around to help me navigate the rest of the night. The minute you guys were gone, Ellen started in on how the whole disaster was my fault, because I reneged on her mother’s promise to let her pierce her ears when she turned eleven.”

“Oh, dear.” Penny still smiled, but her gaze was sympathetic. “Don’t tell me. You tried to be logical. And things went south from there?”

“In a big hurry. I ended up having to ground her after all. She got so unpleasant, and I’m so bad at knowing how to stop it. Once, I would have walked away and let her mother handle it. Then, for a while, I just let her get away with whatever, because she’d lost her mom. Now I’m trying to hold her accountable. It’s no fun, but I’m trying to stick to it, even when it hurts.”

“I’m so sorry.” Penny reached up to shove a strand of shining hair from her face. “I feel as if I’m to blame, actually. If only I’d realized they were in the house already.”

“That’s absolutely not your fault. You couldn’t have known she’d be devious enough to hide and refuse to answer the door. Besides, the driver shouldn’t have left her when no one was—”

He broke off, suddenly glimpsing what looked like an angry, purple bruise on the upper rim of Penny’s cheekbone.

It wasn’t large, but the back porch motion-sensitive lights all had switched on when he came through, so the porch was bright as if it were daylight. It was definitely a bruise. She looked as if someone had socked her.

“Oh…” He touched his index finger to the mark before he even thought about it. “What happened?”

She put her own hand to the spot and made a sheepish sound. “Honestly, it’s so ridiculous I almost hate to admit it.” She smiled. “I’m twenty-seven years old, and I don’t know how to juggle. I was trying to learn.”

Juggling? Had he heard her right? “With
what?
Your bowling balls?”

She backed away from the door slightly, so that he could see into the kitchen’s breakfast nook. There, just beside the centerpiece of daisies, were three stones she’d probably found on the creek bed. Mostly rounded, mostly smooth, but too big and heavy for juggling—at least twice the size of golf balls.

“With
rocks?
”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “I don’t have anything sensible, like beanbags, so I thought those might work.” She raised her eyebrows. “I was wrong.”

“Who would have guessed?” He tried not to laugh, but at the moment he felt every day of the seven years between them. How could anyone be so naive? “Did you put something on it?”

She nodded. “I’ve been defrosting peas on my face for the past half hour, so I should be okay. Do you want to come in? I don’t have anything adult to offer you, but I’ve got hot milk on the stove.” She smiled. “And peas.”

Hot milk for a nightcap. He thought back to the first day, when he’d seen her pull into the driveway and assumed she was a stalker, maybe nuts. He almost laughed out loud, thinking how wrong he’d gotten that one.

“I’d love a glass of milk,” he said, though he knew the offer had probably been perfunctory, and she fully expected him to decline. “I should stay out here, though, so I can hear Ellen.”

“Of course.” Maybe it hadn’t been perfunctory, after all. She looked pleased, and he wondered whether she’d been lonely—in there with only her determination to stand on her own two feet for company.

She glanced up at the silvery-gray sky. “The weather’s perfect for it, as long as we don’t get any rain.”

She was right. The temperatures, which had reached the high seventies in the afternoon, had dipped, but not enough to be uncomfortable. A low blanket of clouds had kept the warmth from dissipating. It also held the resin scent of the pines near the earth, thick and sweet. Overall, a fair trade for the loss of starlight.

She went to the stove, poured out two glasses and brought them out onto the porch in a matter of seconds. She led him to the new wooden table she’d put next to the railing overlooking the creek.

This could become a habit, he thought—meeting his adorable, milk-guzzling landlady each night under the pines, with the babbling water for background music. Max was accustomed to city life, where even the deepest midnight hummed with traffic, television sets set too loud, and the occasional ambulance crying in the distance. The absence of mechanized noises made you intensely aware of yourself, he realized…and the people around you.

She leaned back in her chair, put her feet up on the seat, and nursed her warm milk in both palms. “You’re very polite, not even asking me why I was juggling rocks in the middle of the night.”

He took a sip of his milk, which was very sweet, and reminded him forcefully—and pleasantly—of his childhood, back when everything was simple and everyone was a friend.

“I know why,” he said. “It’s on your list. I’m just glad you weren’t in there giving yourself a tattoo. I’ve seen enough damage from needles for one day.”

“Oh, that’s right. I already mentioned the tattoo, didn’t I? The bluebird of happiness. But I must have neglected to mention I plan to put the tattoo on my right hip. I couldn’t possibly reach that by myself.”

He laughed. “The bluebird of happiness?”

“Yeah. Sounds crazy, right? It’s just…a thing from when I was a kid.” She smiled. “And I mentioned the juggling, too, didn’t I? That one may be my undoing. It’s not the scariest thing on my list, but it may be the hardest—for me, anyhow. I’m the most horrible physical klutz.”

He found that hard to believe. If he’d ever seen a body put together right…

“What
is
the scariest thing on the list?”

Her eyes widened. “White-water rafting.” She laughed. “It looks like so much fun, but at the same time I’m deathly terrified of the very thought. If I ever get a check mark next to that one, I’ll feel like a superhero.”

Her sparkling eyes looked so alive. He had a sudden, intense desire to see her master all of it—the juggling, the rafting—every darn thing on her list.

She deserved to feel like a superhero. He’d seen her with her family, with their elderly neighbors, with Alec. It was beautiful, how she offered gentle understanding to everyone around her—even to his unpleasant daughter.

But she had more than handmaiden sweetness inside her. She had fire and grit, and he would love to be there when she finally believed in herself.

“Why juggling, of all things? You planning to join the circus?”

“I’m not sure, really. We used to have a wrangler who could juggle anything.
Anything.
Horseshoes, spurs, boots, bottles.”

“Rocks?”

“No.” She laughed softly. “Even he never tried rocks. But I could watch him for hours. He said he’d teach me, and we’d just begun lessons when my dad fired him for goofing off too much. It broke my heart.”

Max imagined her guileless, sweet-featured face, taken back fifteen or twenty years. She would have looked like an illustration in an old-fashioned children’s book, all wide, oversize Bambi eyes, and bowed, pink-cherub lips.

He pictured how earnestly she would have listened to the old wrangler’s instructions, and how openly she would have sobbed as he departed.

Max raised his glass with a smile. “So now you’d like to learn to juggle, in his honor.”

She grinned, raising hers, too, and clinking them together in a lighthearted toast. “Exactly. But I’m afraid I’m hopeless. If he could see me today, he’d be ashamed of his pupil.”

“Well, we can’t have that.” He set his milk down and stood, thinking about their options. Many of the trees around the cottage were aspens, but taller pines dotted the landscape, too, so there undoubtedly would be cones. He walked the three steps down from the deck, and sure enough within a minute he’d found two that were perfect. Small, more round than oblong, and closed fairly tightly, as if they knew there would be rain before the night was over.

“Here. Let’s try these.” He tested the weight of the cones by bouncing them in his palm. Good—they were light enough that, even if she missed a catch, no one would be bruised. And the bristles weren’t too sharp. His more-callused palm hardly registered a sting, so surely even her softer one would survive.

She looked embarrassed as he climbed back up to her. “Max, I don’t think you understand. I’m not just bad at this. I’m
horrible.
”

“Maybe. But it must be on your list for a reason,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Reluctantly, she stood and placed herself a foot or so in front of him. She looked at his hands. “You only have two pinecones,” she said dubiously. “We need three, right?”

“Not until you get the hang of two. And we are going to start with just one. Try tossing this one from your right hand to your left.”

She did. But she was overly cautious, and the cone moved in an almost straight line.

“Try tossing it higher, so that it traces a rainbow between your hands. We want an arch whose topmost point is just about at eye level.”

She tried again. Much better. He put her through it about a dozen times, until her arms loosened up and she stopped being so self-conscious. Stiff arms were the kiss of death to juggling.

Then he had her reverse, and toss from her left hand to her right. She had more trouble with that one, as she was right-side dominant, but eventually, that movement, too, was fluid.

“Excellent,” he said, and she gave him a wry smile, well aware that he was cheerleading much as he might have with Ellen.

“Excellent if I were five years old,” she grumbled.

But he just laughed and held out the second cone. “See if you can toss the one in your right hand in that same kind of arc toward your left hand. But this time, when it reaches its highest point, throw the one in your left hand up in an arc toward your right hand. Make sense?”

It clearly didn’t. She frowned at him as if he were talking in another language. She looked at her hands, made a couple of pretend tosses, like a golfer hitting a practice swing, frowned again and then began to laugh.

“I hear your words,” she said, “and in my head I even see exactly what you want. But when I try to make my hands do that, everything gets scrambled.”

He could tell she wasn’t kidding. “Why not try?” Maybe he could spot the problem.

She grimaced. She threw one cone tightly and, simultaneously, as if mildly panicked, tossed the other one—way too soon. Inevitably, both cones landed at her feet, and her hands closed awkwardly over thin air. She groaned, clearly mortified far beyond the true importance of the thing. She bent to pick up the cones, inspecting them for damage as if she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes.

“See? I’m like this with everything physical.” She straightened finally, and shrugged. “I can’t dance, or jump rope, or play tennis. My fine motor skills are no problem. I can smock and crochet and paint and cross-stitch like a fiend. But hand me a ball, and I’m as clumsy as a fish on a bicycle.”

He heard something new in her tone. “That’s not even you talking, really, is it? That’s somebody else. Somebody who always said you were terrible at sports.”

Just as Lydia had always told Ellen she would be fat, if she didn’t watch what she ate. It had driven Max mad. Who told a ten-year-old little girl it was time to worry about her weight? Who told a girl of any age such a thing? Worry about her health, yeah, you might say that someday—only after everything else, like making healthy food exciting and making exercise fun, had failed. But warn her about getting “fat”? Never. No one. At any age.

He watched Penny’s face, to see if the comment struck home. Would she know instinctively whose voice she’d been channeling? Her sisters, perhaps? Rowena looked the athletic type—had she been scornful of the diffident little sister who excelled at more stereotypically domestic skills?

Or maybe her dad? Had he been a bit of a chauvinist? After it became clear he’d have nothing but daughters, a man like that might grow resentful.