The Year Everything Changed (13 page)

“You don’t think it will matter to Cassidy and John that Jeff and I loved each other when they were conceived?”

Trapped by her own logic. “I think it’s going to matter a lot more how you and Jeff treat each other from now on.”

“Maybe someday it will get easier, but right now, at times, it’s everything I can do to be civil to him. I think I’m doing okay, and then I see him and I get so angry all I want to do is throw something at him.”

“So, I take it the separation was your idea?”

“What would you do if you found out your husband was screwing the mother of one of your daughter’s soccer friends?”

“I know what I’d want to do—hire a hit man.” She flinched. Rachel didn’t know her well enough to know she wasn’t serious. “You know I’m kidding, right?”

Rachel smiled at Ginger’s retraction. “Yeah, well, it’s not as if I’m the first person this has happened to. I’ll get over it.”

The flippant answer belied the new-kid-in-school look in Rachel’s eyes. “Does he love her?” Ginger asked.

“He says he never loved her. It was just one of those things—one that went on for months.”

“Maybe you can work it out,” Ginger said carefully. She was about as qualified to offer marital advice as she was to play quarterback for the Forty-Niners. “But then maybe you don’t want to.”

“I keep thinking about the kids growing up the way I did.” She propped her elbow on the back of the sofa and leaned her head into her hand. “And then I see Jeff and think about him with her, and it’s like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. It’s not just the sex part that bothers me. I wonder what they talked about and whether she made him laugh. Did he buy her things? Did he sneak off to call her when he was with me?”

Ginger was growing more and more uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was headed. “You know you can drive yourself crazy thinking about things like that and not even come close to the way it was between them.”

“I can’t help it. The harder I try to put it out of my mind, the more it’s there.” Rachel reached for the empty wine bottle. “I’ll be right back.” She returned with a fresh one, filled Ginger’s glass and then her own, and took a sip. “I don’t know if this one is better or my taste buds are numb.”

Ginger swirled, smelled, and tasted. “It’s better.”

Rachel settled in again. “Enough about Jeff. Tell me about the man in your life. I’m assuming there is one.”

Marc was the last person she wanted to talk about with Rachel. “We’ve been going together for almost four years now—”

“Going together or living together?”

“We lived together for a while and then decided it wasn’t working, so we each have our own place now.” The truth, even if varnished with a wide brush.

“So marriage isn’t an option?”

“We haven’t ruled it out entirely.”

“Are you from here?”

“Kansas. I followed Marc to San Jose when he was promoted about a year ago.” She’d given up her own upcoming promotion at the job she’d held for ten years to accept a job with Selex Electronics at half the pay. Half the pay, twice the living expenses, and an unanticipated culture shock she was still struggling to overcome. Not a smart combination.

“It must be love.”

“Yeah,” Ginger laughed. “Or a sickness.”

“Same thing,” Rachel said.

“I never wanted some big career, just a hearth and home and two-point-five kids.”

“With your looks—”

“Oh, please don’t—I’ve heard that kind of thing all my life. What my looks have gotten me is a lifetime of the wrong men hitting on me and the right ones being afraid to even talk to me. Women automatically assume I’m out to steal their potbellied husbands, and everyone, including kids, assumes I’m stupid.”

“So, given the choice, you’d rather be ugly?”

Ginger smiled. “Average would be nice.”

Rachel took a sip of wine. “I liked being married.” She was quiet for a long time. “I hate living like this.”

“How does Jeff feel?”

“He thinks I should move back. At least until we see if we can work things out. But I can’t do it.”

“Maybe with time. . . .”

“If it were you—if the man you love had an affair—do you think you could find a way to trust him again?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. The lies Ginger told herself, the reasoning she used to justify her own affair, the promises that sustained her sanity, seemed shallow in the face of Rachel’s pain. Was this how Marc’s wife felt? Was this the real reason Judy insinuated herself into every moment of Marc’s day?

Why was she doing this? Judy was nothing like Rachel. Their circumstances were completely different. And she was nothing like the woman Jeff had had an affair with. She loved Marc. And he loved her.

“I don’t know if I could find a way,” Ginger said, shaken. “But I know I would look really hard.”

Rachel nodded. She offered her glass to Ginger for a toast. “I never would have believed this, but I actually think I might like having a sister after all.”

Touched by Rachel’s unexpected sentiment, Ginger lightly tapped her glass against Rachel’s. “Me, too.”

Chapter Nineteen
Lucy

“How is he?” Lucy asked, shifting the small overnight bag she’d brought with her to her other hand.

Rhona opened the front door wider to let Lucy enter. “I’ve never watched anyone die,” she said. “But I have a feeling it won’t be long now. When he wakes up, it’s only for a minute or two and then he’s asleep again.”

“I tried to get here sooner.”

Rhona put her hand on Lucy’s arm. “You don’t have to explain. He knows how you feel about him. So do I.”

The small intimacy almost undid Lucy. She’d been with Jessie every day for the past week, watching, waiting, listening when he could talk, sitting quietly by his side when he drifted off to sleep. “I want to be with him. . . .” She couldn’t finish.

Rhona walked down the hall with Lucy. At the door to Jessie’s bedroom, she said, “Mr. Reed doesn’t know, but Ms. Reynolds was here this morning.”

Lucy stopped and looked at Rhona. “Ginger was here?”

“She stayed a couple of hours, but Jessie slept the whole time. He’s going to be sorry he missed her.”

“Did she say why she came?”

Rhona shook her head. “And I didn’t ask.”

Lucy glanced at Jessie. “I’ll tell him when he wakes up.”

“No need,” Jessie said. Without opening his eyes, he took a deep, labored breath. “I heard.”

“You need something for pain?” Rhona asked.

Still Jessie didn’t open his eyes. “No, not yet. I want to talk to Lucy first.”

She handed Rhona her bag and moved to the bed, close enough for Jessie to feel her presence. “I’m here.”

Finally, with obvious effort, Jessie looked at her. He studied her face for a long time, as if charting every line and angle, and then smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said softly.

Her heart filled her throat. “Why?” she managed to whisper.

“It’s time to say good-bye.”

She nodded and reached for his hand, curling her fingers into his palm. “I’m going to miss you.”

For long seconds he didn’t say anything, his look questioning. He stopped to take several breaths. “I wasn’t going to do this. There’s no point in it—not really.” Almost imperceptibly, his hand tightened around hers. “It’s just that I’ve been thinkin’ it so long it seems wrong not to say it at least once while I still can. I love you, Lucy. Always have . . . always will.”

In a choked whisper, she said, “I know. I love you, too.”

“Can you stay a while?”

A tear stole over her eyelashes and escaped to slip down her cheek. She blinked back its companions. She didn’t want his last image of her to be one of her crying. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He smiled, winked at her one last time, and closed his eyes. Within seconds he was asleep, his breathing shallow and labored, his hand loose in her grip.

Lucy lost all sense of time as she stood and watched Jessie, knowing his heartbeats were numbered, understanding that he would not yield one of them to ease or comfort. He simply didn’t know how to give up; he never had.

The heat of the day gave way to a cooling delta breeze as the sun drifted toward the horizon. Lucy asked Rhona to turn off the air conditioning and open the windows, letting the sheer curtains in the bedroom move and billow with the summer-scented air. With it came the sounds of children playing, lives just beginning. Someone was barbecuing, someone else drove by on a motorcycle. Baby birds frantically chirped to be fed.

Jessie breathed.

Lucy settled deeper into the chair beside the bed and reached for the recorder Jessie had used to make her tapes. She pulled out the one she’d been listening to the day before and put in the one that followed. Settling the earphones over her ears, she abandoned the world Jessie was leaving and followed him to a time when he was still a boy.

Jessie’s Story

Doesn’t matter how much oil you’re pulling out of the ground, it’s not worth anything if you can’t get it where it’s got to go. I learned this my usual ass-backward way when I broke my left arm and the only thing I was good for was driving the truck to Coulter City to pick up supplies four or five times a day. It took a while to figure out how to steer with my knees and shift with my good arm, but I got so good at it I kept right on doing it after the cast came off.

There was always someone in charge of something hitching a ride to the oil fields, and I figured I might as well spend the time learning a thing or two I hadn’t known the day before, so I asked a lot of questions.

One of the men, Alden Atkins, was there leasing land from the ranchers to run a pipeline between the fields and the railroad. He told me most of the men he dealt with were glad for the little extra money the deal brought, but once in a while he’d run into one who didn’t want anything to do with anyone who had anything to do with oil.

Of course I wanted to know what he did then and wasn’t glad for asking when I heard the answer. Where I came from men went to jail for killing a man’s cattle or burning his barn. Here it seemed neighbors were willin’ to look the other way if someone was standing between them making enough from lease money to keep their ranch or losing it to the bank.

I thought about this a lot when I didn’t have anyone with me on my runs. There had to be a better way to get people to do what you wanted than scarin’ the hell out of them. I was still thinking about it when I made a night run a week later and picked up a man who’d hit a deer with his car. He was bleeding from where his head had hit the windshield and thinking he was headed to town to get it fixed. But he was walking the wrong way and would have been lying in a ditch with crows sitting on his chest by morning if I hadn’t turned him around. When we passed his car a couple of miles down the road, he all of a sudden got it in his head that I’d saved his life and that he owed me for it.

The short of it is that he gave me a piece of information that night that had me working for myself two years later. Six months after that I was living in a house with real wood sides and driving a truck I bought with a fistful of cash.

The man swore me to secrecy when he told about the refinery his company was going to build in New Mexico, closer to Coulter City by fifty miles than the railroad—and in the opposite direction. No one had bothered getting right-of-way leases from the ranchers on the west side of town. There wasn’t any need.

The next day on one of my runs into town I stopped at Chapman’s, the biggest and best dry goods store in town. In the six months I’d been there, Coulter City had gone from a twenty-foot-wide road scratched through the prairie grass, yucca, and sandsage to a full-blown town. The single service station, lumber yard, and restaurant had grown to twelve grocery stores, twenty dry goods, seventeen lumber yards, thirty-eight cafés, twelve supply houses, and ten drugstores. The people who worked in the oil fields lived in pine-planked houses and canvas tents that emerged from the body of Main Street like a butterfly unfolding its wings.

The clerk at Chapman’s helped me spend half my savings on a suit, tie, shirt, new shoes, and what I figured had to be the finest felt fedora ever sold in Texas. My jaw dropped to my knees when the clerk brought me out of the dressing room to look in the mirror. It wasn’t a boy looking back, but a man. A stranger.

No one I knew had ever owned clothing so fine as that suit and hat. I stood there for a long time trying to imagine myself walking up to some rancher’s door and talking him into doing business with me looking the way I did. What would my pa think if it was him staring at me through the screen door? The shoes were too shiny, the jacket too pressed to convince anyone I wasn’t exactly what I was—a greenhorn trying to pass himself off as something he wasn’t.

That night I waited till I was sure everyone was asleep before I put on my new clothes and sneaked outside. I tried not to think how hard I’d worked to buy brand new instead of borrowing someone’s Sunday best while I was out there rolling around in the hard west Texas dirt workin’ to make the new look old. I scuffed the shine off the shoes kicking rocks but had to close my eyes before I could take that fine fedora in my hand and fling it into the air. It caught a gust of wind and landed in a shinnery oak higher than I could reach without climbing. On the way down I caught my britches on a branch and tore a hole that let the sun shine through where it shouldn’t. A woman in town fixed the tear and cleaned the trousers as best she could, leaving just enough dust for me to brush away while I was standing on a farmer’s porch waiting to be asked inside.

I didn’t have to do near the talking or persuading I’d anticipated. Once I explained I wasn’t just leasing their land but offering a percentage of the profit from every gallon of oil that flowed from the field through their ranches to the refinery, I had fifteen out of the sixteen leases within three weeks. I didn’t need all that land, but had to make sure no one else got enough to go around me. By the time I was done, my share was down to forty-three percent. The only money I was out I was wearing on my back.

The last ranch was the largest and right in the middle of the others. It was key to keeping the cost of actually laying the pipe appealing to the investors I would approach next. The ranch was owned by a man named Wyatt Farnsworth. I’d been warned that he hated everything about oil, cursing the derricks as loudly and profanely as the people who built and lived in the towns that had sprung up around them. However, it seemed he saved his greatest wrath for the foreigners who had moved in following the discovery of oil, and to Wyatt Farnsworth a foreigner was anyone born outside the great state of Texas.

I had two strikes against me before I’d even picked up the bat.

Opening the gate to the Farnsworth ranch that Sunday afternoon wasn’t as hard as I’d feared. I’d convinced myself by then that not even Wyatt Farnsworth would shoot someone for trespassing on the Lord’s day without at least discovering why he’d come. I didn’t expect to make it all the way to the porch without being challenged, so I wasn’t sure what to do after I opened the screen, turned the bell on the front door, and waited for someone to answer. As I stood there I tried to decide whether I’d make a better impression holding my fedora or wearing it. I took it off, put it back on, then took it off again. Changing my mind one more time, I had the hat halfway back on when I spotted someone staring at me through the curtains at the side window.

My face caught fire and burned so hot it was like pressing my cheek to the top of a potbelly stove. I said a prayer for the ground to open and swallow me whole, but like most of my prayers, it went unanswered. Instead the door opened and I was greeted by a man trying so hard not to laugh that the veins on his neck stuck out like ropes. Someone, a girl or woman—from the volume and sound of it, likely both—demonstrated less restraint.

My hat wound up pressed to my chest, where I held it like a shield. Wyatt Farnsworth was tall and wide, his head just shy of hitting the top of the door frame, his body as thick as a hay bale. He was nearly bald and had a mustache waxed to form circles at each end. I opened my mouth to introduce myself, but the words stuck in my throat.

“What is it, boy? I haven’t got all day.”

“Mr. Farnsworth?”

“Who’s asking?”

I took a chance and stuck out my hand. “Jessie Reed.”

He ignored the gesture. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I’d stressed the need for secrecy with the other farmers, at least until the deal was set. Plainly they’d had other ideas. “You have?”

He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Figured you had to show up sooner or later. You can’t get where you want to go without me and my land.”

“I mean no disrespect, Mr. Farnsworth, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t be easy, but I can get there.” I managed to say it in a calm, clear voice, but I was more knee-knocking scared at that moment than when I was seven years old and my Uncle Jeb convinced me there was a ghost living under my bed. “It would put a whole lot more money in everyone’s pocket—including yours—if the pipeline doesn’t have to go around you. But as my pa used to say, there’s more to life than money. If you don’t want what should be your share, that’s your choice.”

The sentiment brought a derisive snort. “That’s the kind of thing a man says after the bank takes everything but his pride.”

I took a chance at that. “My pa didn’t have a whole lot of that left either when he took off for California.” I wasn’t looking for pity and I sure as hell didn’t want to see it in Farnsworth’s eyes, so I looked down at my hat. “That’s why I’m here. I don’t care how long it takes, I’m going to give my pa back what the bank took from him.”

He stared at me long and hard. “I wouldn’t have believed there was anything you could say that would get you invited inside, but you managed to find something.” He motioned for me to follow then turned and disappeared.

I knew I wasn’t getting a second invitation, so I reached for the screen door and stepped inside. There was a parlor to the left, empty as far as I could see. The room to the right had a sliding door open barely wide enough for someone to look through. I figured he couldn’t have gone in there or I would have heard the door close. I stopped to listen and noticed a painting hanging at the end of the hall. It was of a young woman sitting astride a black horse. I moved closer, wiping my sweaty hand on my trousers, shifting the fedora and wiping the other hand the same way.

I’d never paid much attention to paintings so didn’t know if this was a good one or not. It didn’t matter, good or bad; what was there reached out and grabbed me—the girl. I’d never seen anyone as beautiful. She had long black hair and blue eyes the color of a summer morning sky before the sun baked it dry. Her slim waist would have fit between my hands, and her breasts would have filled them.