The Sweet Spot (10 page)

Why are people in this town so damned comfortable wandering around in my business?

Junior’s story had stirred dust he thought long settled. He missed Ben. Junior was
right about one thing: His father-in-law was a good man. Ben had given his time, his
knowledge, himself, with his patient explanations when JB was learning the bull business.

But Charla had slammed that door and locked it. It felt like for the second time in
his life, JB’s family had been killed in a car crash.

Only this time he’d been driving.

He signed onto the Denny Bucking Bull website. He’d always liked the photo of Mighty
Mouse on the home page, bucking almost vertical on his front feet.

“Now, there’s one damn fine bull.” He smiled, reading the Mouse’s stats, then clicked
to the semen order page. “Goddamn!” He grabbed for his phone and hit speed dial for
the house. What the heck was Charla Rae thinking, raising the price?

She was laughing as she picked up the call. “I’m not going to let anything happen
to you, just relax. Hello?”

He hadn’t heard that delighted, tinkling laugh in over a year. It slammed into his
chest like a fist. He sat up and dropped his feet to the floor.
Who made her laugh again?
“Char?”

“Oh, hi, Jimmy. We’re about to head out.”

She sounded like a carefree teen, off for a day of partying. Something in him tore
open, unleashing a flash of fury. “Why the hell did you change the price of Mighty
Mouse’s straws? Don’t you realize that you’re gonna price us out of the market? You
shouldn’t be messing in something you don’t know anyth—”

“Sales are up.” Her voice bristled with ice. “Way up. Check out the income statement.
Oh, and Jimmy?” She hesitated. “Keep your opinion out of my side of the business.”

Click
.

His fingers flew, signing onto their accounting software. He pulled up a current income
statement. Damn. Little Bit was right. The semen
had
been undervalued. She’d made a good business decision, and she could use the money.
So why did it feel like someone had taken a torque wrench to his innards?

“Bad news?” Bella stood, hand on the back door.

Char shook her head to rid it of Jimmy’s angry voice. “Old news.” She picked up her
pocket knife, slipped it in her jeans pocket, and strode to the door. “Are you ready
for a day in the life of a rancher?”

Bella laughed. “I get a day off at the feed store, and I’m spending it playing cowgirl.
If my friends in New York saw me, they’d have me committed.”

Char looked her friend over, from hair to boot tips. This time, at least, Bella wore
jeans, but Char insisted she wear a denim work shirt over the tube top so she wouldn’t
burn to a crisp. “Hang on a minute.” She snagged a battered straw cowboy hat from
the rack that hung next to the door and slapped it on Bella’s head. “Now you look
the part.”

Bella settled the hat at a jaunty angle and winked. “Let’s go rustle us some cattle,
pardner.” She spun and strutted out the door, hips rolling.

“Rosa, we’ll be out back!” Char yelled.

“We’re fine.” The nurse’s muffled voice came from the living room. She’d gotten out
the old albums, and Ben was telling her stories behind the photos. Char’s step was
light as she crossed the yard. Rosa was a godsend, literally. She had to remember
to call Reverend Mike and thank him for the referral.

That afternoon, with Bella’s help, Char got ahead of the chores for the first time.
They mucked stalls, tossed bales of hay from the loft, and fed the cattle.

Now Char reclined on a hay bale, instructing Bella on the finer points of currying
a horse. Her new friend worked her way down to the hindquarters when the stocky
bay whisked her tail, slapping her across the cheek. Bella ignored it, gave the shiny
flank one more swipe, and walked to the horse’s head to give her a pat.

“Well? How do we look?”

“Bar B looks super.” Char grinned. “You, on the other hand, could use some work.”
Bella’s pretty boots were covered in manure and her two-hundred-dollar jeans were
grass-stained at the knees. Straw dangled from the sleeve of her filthy work shirt,
and the white tube top looked like a ragbag escapee. The tail swish had left brown
stripes, like war paint, across Bella’s sunburned cheek. But her blue eyes sparkled
over a self-satisfied grin. With thumbs hooked in her front pockets, she stood hipshot
like a saucy teenage tomboy.

“It’s not fair. You look as cute in dirt as I do dressed for church.” Char heaved
herself to her feet and crossed the aisle. Lifting her shirttail, she licked it, then
scrubbed it across Bella’s cheek.

Bella ducked away. “Yuk.”

Char felt blood pound to her cheeks. “Sorry. Habit.” She glanced to where afternoon
sun stood centered in the barn doorway. “Should we save the horseback riding lesson
for another day? There
will
be another time, won’t there?” She felt guilty about putting Bella to slave labor,
but she’d insisted, and Char was learning that this woman didn’t do anything by halves.

Smiling, Bella trailed ragged fingernails down the horse’s smooth flank. “Can I ride
Bar B?”

“I take back most of what I’ve thought about city girls. They’re tougher than they
look.” Char shook her head. “Just remember, you asked for it. Next lesson, how to
tack up a horse.”

Twenty minutes later, Char backed Pork Chop into a corner, put her foot in the stirrup,
and swung her leg over. The past weeks had given her a tentative pride in her improving
riding skills but not much confidence in the vagaries of equine behavior.

Bella sat aboard Bar B, a white-knuckled grip on the saddle horn, beaming as if she’d
just been crowned Gillespie County Rodeo Queen. Char gathered the bay’s reins with
her own—no reason to take chances with a greenhorn.

Once her toes found the stirrups, Char squeezed with her thighs. The mare’s ears twitched.
She gave a gentle nudge with her heel, and the horse stomped a hoof. “Dang it, Pork
Chop, you’re lazier than a hound dog in the sun.” Char gave her a good kick. The mare
snorted, then stepped out. As they clopped down the breezeway of the barn into the
hammered sun of the yard, she looked over at Bella. “I’ll be glad when I can afford
a four-wheeler. So much more efficient.”

“Those loud, nasty things? Besides, you’d miss this gorgeous view.” Bella’s head swiveled,
trying to see everything at once. Char had been too busy lately to see the homestead
as much more than a job to be done.

The yard drowsed in the searing afternoon sun. Swallows darted from the hayloft of
the barn, dipping and diving, chasing bugs. Bees droned in her mom’s neglected rose
bushes where they grew against the house, stems akimbo.

The old bathtub that served as a watering trough was a white block against the tall
grass that had flourished in its splashes, bluebonnets hiding in the shade of the
lip. Char inhaled the first scents of summer in the dust stirred by the horse’s hooves
as they ambled across the yard.

“Oooh, aren’t they adorable!” Bella nodded toward
the pasture they used as a nursery, where young calves cavorted at their mother’s
sides.

Char snorted. “This is a business, city girl. Those calves are revenue, whether they
grow up buckers, brood stock, or bound for the sale barn.”

“You can’t see this, can you?” Bella spread her arms. “I get to work with Junior,
sacks of manure, and a Dumpster monkey.”

Still holding both sets of reins, Char led the way down the path to the pond where
bullrushes crowded the shore. A chevron of mallards cruised the mirrored surface,
leaving scarcely a ripple. When she and Bella reached the shoreline, the horses nickered
and lowered their heads to drink. The sun’s heat on Char’s back relaxed her sore muscles.
She soaked up the serenity of the scene. She recalled the lazy days of her youth,
when the vacation months stretched before her like the best kind of dream. A sigh
escaped before she could stop it.

“Tell me about your life, Char, before the accident.”

Her diaphragm hitched as her breath caught. Thoughts of Benje leached the warmth from
the day.

Bella held up a hand. “Only the parts you feel comfortable talking about. I don’t
mean for it to hurt. I only want to know you better.”

Bella’s worried glance told Char she meant well, so she considered. Bella had bared
her soul at the kitchen table. Weighing how she felt about baring her own scars, the
Valium called to Char for the first time today. Want zinged beneath her skin like
a poison ivy itch. She scrubbed her palms over her forearms in a fruitless attempt
to soothe.

Maybe if she said it…

Bella sat patiently watching. Char focused on the
peace of the placid pond and her happy memories, hoping to calm the jitters.

“A fairy tale.” She said. “That’s what it was like. Before.” She crossed her arms
over the saddle horn as Pork Chop lowered her head to graze.

“Once we’d settled into marriage and moved back here, Jimmy and I about wore ourselves
out trying for a baby. We planned to have a house overflowing with kids.” She chuckled,
remembering. “Poor Jimmy. I’d call him when my temperature spiked, and he’d come running,
wherever he was. I started to feel like one of our cows, getting serviced. The doctors
said there was no reason we couldn’t conceive, but for years, we didn’t.”

She felt the corners of her mouth lift. “Until we did. After ten years, we’d given
up and decided we’d have a good life, just the two of us. But having Benje was like
going from watching black-and-white TV to color; you don’t realize how dull it was
until after.”

She searched for a way to explain. “June Cleaver. You called me that once, and you
were right. I had the house, Jimmy, and Benje. We lived in this charmed bubble. I’d
found my exact perfect place in the world. It never occurred to me that, for all its
beauty, a bubble is by nature a fragile thing.

“Benje’s accident, Jimmy taking up with that cupcake, and my—” She swallowed the ball
in her throat so she could spit out the word, “
addiction
finished off the marriage, but there were problems building, even before. Somewhere
along the line, Jimmy changed. Real slow, at first, so I hardly noticed.”

“What do you mean?”

Char struggled to put the feelings into words. “In the
beginning, Jimmy was so grateful. For me, for the ranch, for my family. His parents
died when he was young, and his grandma too, right after high school. He had nobody.
And family meant everything to Jimmy.” She glanced over to Bella’s rapt attention.
“After Benje was born, and Jimmy got the PBR announcing gig, it was like he got bigger,
and we got smaller. We took up less and less space in his life.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

“No. I knew something wasn’t right, but it happened so slowly, I couldn’t put my finger
on what was wrong. We didn’t fight. It wasn’t awful. It was like some wasting disease
took over our relationship, bit by tiny bit.

“Then the accident.” Flashes of The Day, under the tree, exploded in her brain, and
she jerked upright, her body rigid. Pork Chop threw her head up, uneasy. Char’s mind
skittered away from the memory. Some things were unspeakable.

A cool touch on the back of her hand pulled her from the trance. She looked down to
where Bella’s hand covered hers, fisted tight in the reins. Bella’s cool fingers laced
with hers in wordless comfort. An itinerant breeze brushed her face as Pork Chop lowered
her head again to graze.

“Jimmy made all the arrangements, after. My brain worked slow, like a computer with
a virus. I’d start to speak, but I’d hear a static hiss of white noise in my head,
so I’d stop to listen. I could almost decipher a voice in the babble. Next thing I
know, Jimmy’s shaking me, and his panicked look scared me more than the fact that
I lost several minutes.”

She waited, trying to squeeze the words past frozen
vocal cords. “I didn’t want to go.” Acid splashed like a sheet of ice water in her
gut. “To the funeral. It was as if the accident walled me off behind a barrier that
only I could see. I didn’t know these people. Not anymore.”

And that wasn’t the worst of it. “I sat there drugged, in the packed, too-hot church,
hundreds of eyes crawling on my back. Jimmy sat beside me, holding my hand, tears
sheeting down his face. I sat like a small rabbit, frozen in the knowledge that I’d
have to face the yawning black hole that would swallow my baby.”

Bella’s fingers spasmed in hers. But now that Char had started, she couldn’t seem
to stop the truth gushing from her mouth.

“I imagined myself breaking away from Jimmy, running to the flower-draped casket,
tearing it open, and rescuing my Benje. After all, isn’t it a mother’s job to protect
her child?” She turned her head away. She didn’t want to know Bella’s reaction. “I
had to wait. The right time would present itself. I had to be ready.

“My eyes jittered over the white roses covering the casket. The reverend’s monotone
became a drone—like summer bees.”

Her lungs had labored against the cloying smell of roses and smothering heat. A single
white rose blurred, then came into perfect focus. A slight tinge of tan marred the
edge of one petal, a glistening drop of moisture on another. She watched, rapt, as
a small bee climbed from the center, its drone combining with the others, swelling,
filling her head with a manic, reverberating hum. She’d clapped her hands over her
ears and watched with horror as the bee crawled to the edge of the rose. Teetering
on the edge, it looked right at her with an obscene, leering grin.

“I woke up in my own bed twelve hours after the funeral.” Char dropped Bella’s hand
and lifted her hair off her sticky neck, hoping for a breeze. “I’d passed out in the
church.”

Two shiny tracks ran down Bella’s smudged face. “You missed the graveside service.
I’m so sorry.”

Char shuddered. “I’m not.”