B00DVWSNZ8 EBOK (4 page)

“
Hah. I dare you.”

“He might never recover fro
m the shock."

They reached the house and stomped barn dirt off their feet on the back stoop. "How many times have we had this conversation?" Suzanne said, opening the back door and leading the way into a utility room. She began washing her hands in the deep utility sink. "As long as your daddy and your granddaddy are alive and well and as long as you continue to live at that ranch, you're stuck with what you're doing. Unless you find a husband all of you like."

Jude leaned a shoulder against the wall, watching Suzanne wash up. "Don't I know it. That's why I wanted to buy the Wallace land. I wanted...well, you know what I wanted to do."

Indeed, Jude had told Suzanne often enough. She wanted to buy some Angus cattle and
some other crossbreeds. She wanted to raise some calves that she would
not
ship to be fattened in a feed lot. Grass-fed beef was the coming trend. It was healthier. At the ranch, they ate only grass-fed beef themselves.

Suzanne tore off sheets of paper towel and dried her hands. "I saw some of that organic beef in Albertsons down in Abilene
. It costs more."

She stepped aside, giving Jude access to the sink
and Jude began washing her own hands. "But consumers are buying it. They're proving they would rather pay more to get the healthier meat."

"Well, you aren't gonna change any minds at the Circle C," Suzanne said. "There probably isn't a living soul out there who wants to fool with grass-fed steers. They'd probably have to hire more cowboys."

Jude didn't disagree. Leaving the spring calves on the range to graze longer would require more care by the hands.

"So stop fighting it, girl," Suzanne said. "Get in J.D.'s fancy plane
, fly over to Fort Worth and have a good time."

The ranch owned a
small jet that was housed at the airport in Lubbock. A landing strip and hangar had been built on the ranch when the plane was purchased years ago, but keeping a jet airplane at the Circle C was a maintenance and logistical challenge. Daddy had eventually decided it made more sense to let the plane stay in Lubbock, where qualified people could take care of it. Now, when he wanted to fly somewhere, the pilot flew the hundred miles from Lubbock to the ranch and picked him up. Jude could use it anytime, of course, and occasionally she had.

"Pick up some guy you like and try him out," Suzanne went on. "Get a bottle of wine, rent a room, get naked and wallow in hot
porno sex for a couple of days. Who knows? He might turn out to be
the one
."

Jude's curiosity had always been aroused by Suzanne's remarks about sex. She usually said just enough to generate questions she never answered. Jude shook water off her hands and reached for a paper towel. "
And you've done that. I know."

Staring out the window above the washing machine and dryer, Suzanne gave a low chuckle. "Yeah. I've done that."

Jude could see that Suzanne's mind had traveled somewhere else. Something about the plaintive ring in her voice made Jude say, "I still wonder what you could possibly do for two days? I mean, the whole thing lasts only a few minutes."

Suzanne looked at her with a Mona Lisa smile and shook her head. "Jude, Jude, Jude. For a thirty-year-old woman, you are so dumb."

Jude threw her paper towel in the trash. "I'm not thirty. Yet."

Suzanne walked into the kitchen. "Well, you're close. My question
is still the same as it has always been. Just how stupid were those two dudes you were engaged to?"

Jude followed her. "I don't know. I just
can’t figure out what you'd do for two whole days in a hotel room. Sounds boring to me."

Suzanne reached into the cupboard for two tall glasses. "What you do, girlfriend, is screw like rabbits and come about
two dozen times. Then you start over and do it again."

What Jude knew about sex surfaced in her mind. Her brow furrowed. "But no male animals can—what I mean is, men can't—"

"But
you
can, girlfriend."

The heat of embarrassment crawled up Jude's neck. Feeling Suzanne's eyes on her, she didn't look up.

"Can't you?"

Now Jude's cheeks were flaming. "Of course I can. It's just that..."

Shut up, Jude!
She stopped talking. She had never come two dozen times. The truth was, it hadn't happened at all, but she had never told Suzanne. She knew exactly how sex worked, but she didn't know how it was supposed to
feel
. One thing she had always suspected, though, was that she had missed something.

Not wanting
to discuss her limited experience, Jude gave an exaggerated sigh. "Suzanne, are you going to feed me lunch or what?"

Suzanne set the two glasses of ice on the counter, then opened the refrigerator.
After rummaging for a few minutes, she came out with her arms and hands loaded with jars and packages. She pushed the refrigerator door shut with her foot. "I’m still pissed that you gave Webb blow jobs but he didn't return the favor."

Jude closed her eyes and
arched her brow, wishing now she had never asked Suzanne about her past experiences. In fact, Webb had been interested only in his own gratification. And because Jude hadn't figured that out right away, she had put up with it for nine months.

"That's just like a friggin' lawyer," Suzanne
added fiercely, thrusting a jar of mayonnaise and a sealed carton into Jude's hands. "I told you about that lawyer I dated in Lubbock. We hung out with all of his lawyer friends. Self-centered fuckers, every one of them."

Jude leaned on the counter, watching as Suzanne began opening packages and cartons. "Webb thought it was unsanitary," she said.

Suzanne made a little huff of disgust. "And he thought you sucking his dick wasn't? See what I mean? Self-centered. I'm telling you, what a guy does for you in bed says a lot about him and what he thinks of you."

"It wasn't a big deal. I can't believe men really like to do that anyway."

"Well, they do. It makes them hot. And it shows unselfishness on their part. Shows they want you to have a good time, too."

She frowned and cocked her head, holding a knife and a slice of bread suspended. "Then again, maybe it's not unselfishness. 'Cause they probably figure if they do it to you, you'll do it to them. But on the other hand, that doesn't count if it's a one-sided deal."

She slathered mayonnaise on the bread slice and placed it on a plate. "Just take my word for it, Jude, when you find a guy who does it all, you'll be so hungry for it, you'll beg him."

Jude made an unladylike snorting noise. She couldn't imagine the day she would be so hungry for sex she would beg. "No doubt all
of that is why you hung on to some character in Wyoming who beat you up."

"
There’s lots of guys out there who want sex, girlfriend, but a good lay's hard to find. If you've got one, it's worth trying to hang on to it."

Chapter 3

After walking the fence lines closest to the barn and house, Brady's frustration and worry had only deepened. So much work to be done. So much money required. Brush removal alone would cost a small fortune. Most troubling of all, he didn't know if a living could be made in this day and age on fifteen sections of West Texas pastureland, even under the best circumstances.

His practical businessman side told him he was caught in a dubious enterprise. But the eternal optimist that had kept him going through the many highs and lows of his life told him he was a lucky man to have been given free land and he had to honor that.

Needing a diversion from the enormous tasks he saw everywhere he looked, he turned his attention to the house. He approached it, eyeing the tumbleweeds that had collected in a corner where the wooden front porch jutted from the house.

The porch roof that wrapped around three sides of the structure
sagged in a swoop across the front. He stepped up onto the wooden porch with caution, putting pressure on one foot and springing a couple of times to test the deck's stability. When he didn't fall through, he walked on across, unlocked the padlock on the front door and entered the living room. The house was empty, just as Aunt Margie's lawyer had said.

In the
hot airless room, lit only by daylight filtering through paper window shades, a hollow silence prevailed. An odor of dust and disuse filled the air. A vintage light fixture hung from the ceiling, its opaque bottom shadowed with what was probably dirt and dead insects.

He had called a few days earlier and had the electrical power turned on, so he tried a toggle switch on the wall.
The light came on and a dim glow showed through the fixture's glass. He was home.

He walked slowly through the living room
and on into the kitchen, his boot heels thudding against the linoleum floor. In the small square room, its walls painted a Christmas green now dingy with age, he found two items that had not been sold: an aged refrigerator and the freestanding gas cook stove. These same appliances had been here when he was a kid. His aunt had cooked hundreds of meals on this stove. When he switched on the refrigerator, it started to hum as if it were new. What else did a person need? In his way of thinking, function had always been more important than form.

Comfort, on the other hand, was extremely important. Having
already sweated through his T-shirt, shorts and even his jeans outside, in the hot house he was now wringing wet. A swamp cooler was mounted in one of the living room windows. He hadn't lived with a swamp cooler since the summers he had spent in this house.

Before plugging
it in to electricity, he studied all the controls, then walked outside to check the outdoor part of it. A flurry of wasps circled the unit's gray metal housing. He remembered his uncle Harry removing a wasp nest from the air conditioner and telling him swamp-cooler housings were perfect places for wasps. When Brady left Stephenville early this morning, he hadn't considered flying varmints. He hadn't brought chemicals to deal with them.

He returned to the tack room in the barn, where he had seen an assortment of cans and jugs, and found a wasp-killer bomb. At his truck, he dragged a long-sleeve shirt from behind the seat and shrugged into it, covered his head and neck with a bandana, then secured it with his cap and shoved on his sunglasses. Ready, he lifted his toolbox out of the truck bed and tackled the swamp cooler.

Half an hour later, without being stung, he had removed the cooler's housing and bombed a wasp nest the size of a football. While wasps expired all around him, he tore loose the nest lodged in the corner, broke it up with his boot heel, then reassembled the cooler.

Now able to examine the unit
closely, he found jagged holes peppering the housing. They were surrounded by red rust and white corrosion. Age and hard water explained both. On the ground, he spotted a rubber garden hose. Once red, it had been faded to pink by the sun. It crossed a pitiful smattering of dried grass between the air conditioner and a stand faucet ten feet away. He turned the spigot and listened as a spew of water flooded the cooler interior’s straw lining. At least that part of it worked.

Back inside the sweltering house, he plugged the old thing in and switched it on. Cool, damp air roared into the living room, along with a gust of dust, sending him into a coughing fit.
But he breathed a sigh of relief that the swamp cooler worked. He returned to his truck for the cleaning supplies he had brought with him.

Soon the swamp cooler had cleared itself of dust and cooled the house. He had swept a gallon of sand from the old linoleum floors. With the help of a rented dolly, he had unloaded some household items and the pieces of furniture he had bought at a Salvation Army store in Fort Worth. A used table and two chairs now sat in the kitchen
. A small sofa, a reclining chair and a small TV almost filled the living room and he had a dresser and a queen-size bed with a good mattress he had bought new in Fort Worth in the bedroom. His six feet and three inches didn't fit comfortably on anything smaller.

Not knowing in what condition, he would find the well, he had brought a case of bottled water with him. He unscrewed the lid on a bottle and wilted
onto a kitchen chair, the first time he had sat down since arriving this morning.

Golden afternoon light streamed through the small bare window above the kitchen sink, highlighting dust
motes floating in the air. Except for the low hum of the refrigerator and the roar of the swamp cooler from the living room, an eerie silence surrounded him, created by the absence of the human being who had always been present in this room with him. Distinct smells from childhood came to him—animal medications Aunt Margie had kept in the refrigerator; Pine-Sol she had used to mop the floors; myriad cooking aromas, like frying bacon, black-eyed peas stewing with ham hock, fresh peach pies and lots of other desserts.

Brady looked around him
. The counter was covered with linoleum nailed down with galvanized roofing nails. Faded linoleum, its pattern worn away entirely in front of the sink and stove; covered the floor. A large sheet of yellowed plastic had been thumb-tacked to the dingy green wall as a grease shield above the cookstove's back. Aunt Margie had never had a lot of money to spend on home improvements.

His memory spun backward.
He envisioned his chunky aunt, her jeans covered by a canvas butcher's apron, the heels of her cowboy boots clomping on the kitchen floor.

An outdated setting had
not prevented Aunt Margie from being a great cook. Once, her chocolate brownies with fresh pecans and thick creamy chocolate frosting had filled this whole house with mouth-watering aromas. As a boy, Brady had thought they were the best things he had ever tasted and he used to wait impatiently for her to finish that last swirl of frosting and give him the spoon to lick.

An even deeper anguish gripped him. His boy Andy had never known anything like that childhood joy. Marvalee had zero interest in baking anything
or even cooking a meal. Andy was missing a lot.

Losing custody of hi
s only child had hurt Brady more than a blow from a two-by-four, even more than giving up his Fort Worth home and everything in it. And the pain was constant, like a thorn endlessly pricking at him.

He had spent money he couldn't afford fighting Marvalee for Andy. He gave up only after his lawyer told him little else could be done. The judge favored mothers.

What the judge hadn’t known and what Brady hadn't been able to prove, was that the average alley cat had better parenting skills than Marvalee Fallon and probably more interest in being a parent. These days, Andy was spending more time with babysitters than with his mother.

Marvalee was so bad at relating to Andy and
to Jarrett, her twelve-year-old son from a previous relationship, that the day Brady had packed his clothing and left the house, Jarrett had come into the bedroom, his face red and wet with tears, and begged Brady to take him with him. Rarely ever seeing his real father, Jarrett called Brady "Dad." And why not? The boy had been a toddler when Brady married Marvalee and Brady had always treated him as if he were his own kid. Brady would have taken Jarrett, would still take him if possible, right along with his own son.

When he began the fight for custody, he figured Marvalee would willingly, even eagerly, give up both boys.
But after her father and his millions entered the fray, the person Brady had battled for custody wasn't Marvalee. The person he had gone against indirectly was his ex-wife's father. Fighting Marvin Lee Erikson had been a David-and-Goliath match. But with a less favorable ending for David.

Brady forced that mind-numbing crap out of his head. He had to get going. He had land, free and clear. What more could a man ask for in this life than ten thousand unencumbered acres? And he intended to have a job before dark. He drained his glass of water and got to his feet.

As the day waned, Jude told Suzanne she had to go home. Her friend walked with her toward her pickup. "What about this for an idea?" Suzanne said. "Get a reservation down at Lake Austin Spa. Go down and lose yourself in decadent attention. Get a facial and two or three massages. Do yoga. Commune with nature and feed the ducks." Suzanne closed her eyes and lifted her shoulders. "That day down there last year was sheer heaven."

For Suzanne's thirtieth birthday, Jude had treated her to a day of beauty at the posh Lake Austin Spa and Resort. Suzanne mentioned it often. Jude
could afford to do more for her best friend and would, but Suzanne would look at her gifts as charity and refuse it. A birthday present was different.

"I don't have to go to Austin to commune with nature," Jude said. "I can look out my window."

"The point is, change your scenery. Just screw off for a week. That's exactly what I'd do if I had your money."

A day idling at a spa held no appeal for Jude. "Yeah, I could do that," she said. "And then what?"

Jude had rarely passed a day doing as little as she had done today, but her mood had improved. Suzanne's off-the-wall approach to life was mood-lifting.

She left the Breedlove house early enough to reach the Circle C in time for supper, conscious that showing up late would cause Daddy and Grandpa to worry.

Beyond that, she disliked arriving after supper was over. Her father and grandfather started their days so early, they went to bed with the chickens. Without them awake to greet her in the Circle C's barnlike house, the old dwelling, with its hard floors and plaster walls and high ceilings, felt hollow and was too silent.

Soon she reached the
red limestone rock stanchions that marked the Circle C's entrance. She made a right turn off the highway and followed a winding two-mile driveway to the house's wide wrought-iron gate. She keyed in the security code and the gate's two halves, each marked with the welded-in Circle C brand, silently crept open.

Another half mile put her in front of the garage adjacent to the house. The ranch house had been built in 1899, before homes had attached garages. Constructed on a bluff looking to the west over a far-reaching red rock canyon, it was a massive three-story structure veneered with red limestone quarried from the ranch's land. It loomed like a fortress among ancient live oak, chinaberry and black walnut trees that a groundskeeper carefully nurtured. Behind it, a fruit orchard grew
. When Jude was a little kid, a garden had grown, too, maintained by her great-grandmother and the kitchen help.

Though its size
and unused rooms made her feel lonely at times, she loved the old house. Some people called it a mansion, others called it an albatross, some even called it haunted, but to her, it was simply home.

In the hundred and nine years since the house's construction, it had been updated, redecorated
added on to and remodeled. Nowadays, it consisted of four three-room bedroom suites and six guest bedrooms, ten bathrooms and two living areas.

There was an octagonal-shaped sunroom that had been added on by Grammy Pen
, it’s floors made of mesquite wood. She’d had the trees cut and hauled to a sawmill to be sawed into planks.

A
breakfast room brightened by the morning sun lay off one end of the huge galley-type kitchen. It joined a large formal dining room where Jude, Grandpa and Daddy ate dinner and supper. Off the kitchen on the other end was a large laundry room, a mudroom, a pantry and a cooling room no longer in use. For that matter, most of the house was no longer in use, though in Jude's youth, the entire Strayhorn family had lived in it.

That had been before the accident.

Except for the years she had been in college, Jude had never lived anywhere else, had never wanted to live anywhere else. Though she had followed in her father's footsteps and gone to college at A&M nearly four hundred miles away, she had never wanted to "go away to school." She had never wanted to reside on either the East or West Coast to rub shoulders with the beautiful people and dabble in liberalism, had never wanted to wander through Europe. Even when she had traveled to Australia once on a study trip, she had been restless to return to Lockett.

Many of her peers thought that in her devotion to the Circle C and Lockett, Texas, she was a throwback of some kind. She often heard, "If I had your money, I'd do this
or I'd do that. But Jude paid those attitudes little attention. She was a Texan to the very marrow of her bones, but more than that, she was a
West
Texan and a part of a family that had made Texas history.