Dodge the Bullet (15 page)

“You say that like someone who’s guilty of
something.”

“I’ve got fresh apple pie for dessert,”
Becky said smiled at Tommy.

“He’s just leaving,” Dodge said. “I’ll have
the special Becky, thanks for asking.”

When she turned to leave in a huff, Tommy
stood up and folded his suit coat over his arm. “You don’t want to
make any friends around here, do you?”

“Why?” Dodge said with a grin. “I’ve got
you.”

###

The place had taken shape, Dodge thought as
his truck hiccupped over the rim of the blacktop and onto the
gravel entrance of the Woodward ranch. The new fences looked good
and set the foundation for a fine cattle ranch. Miguel had already
started fixing the caretakers house. He hadn’t been on a binger
since the last time Dodge chewed his ass for not showing up at
work. Dodge felt sure with living quarters nicer than the beaten
down trailer he’d recently shared with God only knew how many
relatives, Miguel would be just grateful enough to toe the line for
awhile.

Besides replacing the broken window and
patching the leaky roof, he’d let a few cows loose to eat away the
overgrown grass around the house and barns. The place finally
looked occupied, thank goodness. He’d never been comfortable with
Sarah and the boys living at the back of the ranch when the front
was so unkempt it looked abandoned.

His truck edged past a few scraps of old
metal and crept down the long path to the house. It wasn’t even
half past ten, but Dodge couldn’t wait any longer to purge himself
of the sordid details of his past. He felt like an old piece of
furniture waiting to be refinished; telling Sarah the truth would
be like pealing away the old layers of stain and paint. He just
hoped he didn’t end up feeling naked and exposed when the truth
came out.

The garage was open. The sky that perched
above him blazed its glory through the whipped butter clouds of
early summer. He paused on the concrete drive and listened to the
sounds of the river before heading inside. He entered the garage
and took a deep breath. He didn’t want to tell her because what she
thought of him mattered. He’d let it matter, and that really pissed
him off.

Dodge took the stairs slowly after she’d
called for him to come in. He grasped hold of the nearest barstool
as he mounted the top step. The smell hit him first, the clean
citrus of her damp hair and the mint of her toothpaste. What little
blood was left in his head fell firmly south as she stepped into
the light. With her back to the window, her robe was no better than
a transparent film illuminating every delicate curve of her body:
the slender hourglass of her torso, the tapered hips and long, long
legs. Thank God, he almost said aloud, that her crossed arms
concealed her breasts. A man could only take so much.

###

Sarah heard the banging on the door and
glanced at the clock. It was too early to be Dodge and she hadn’t
expected anyone else. She ran her fingers through her damp hair and
cinched the tie on her short cotton robe tighter as she walked
apprehensively to the landing, wishing she’d gotten dressed after
her shower instead of stripping all the beds of their sheets.

She felt relieved when Dodge opened the
door. She asked him to come upstairs and wondered why his eyes had
widened with alarm as he ascended, but then remembered her
appearance. “I wasn’t expecting you quite so soon.” She felt
exposed under the glare of his roaming eyes and as naked as she was
under the thin robe. Standing inches apart wearing practically
nothing, she felt gripped with an excited panic. Part of her wanted
to rip off her robe and see what he’d do while the other, more
practical part had her clasping her hands at the collar to hold the
robe tightly together.

When he reached the top, he gripped the back
of the closest barstool and just stared.

“I’ll go put some clothes on.” She scooted
past him to her bedroom. “There’s coffee in the pot,” she said
before shutting her door.

Sarah leaned against the heavy wood, her
hand still gripping the handle, and closed her eyes. Think. Jenny
always told her she wore every emotion on her face. Could Dodge see
the desire she felt, the tumult of emotions that had caused her
heart to race as fast as her legs in retreat? The way he’d looked
at her, his tawny eyes burrowing into every corner of her body,
every place she suddenly wished to be touched by his calloused
hands. Get a grip, she told herself. And clothes. Get some clothes
on.

Dodge sat at the bar, his hat removed and a
mug of coffee cradled in his hands when she emerged from the back,
dressed in jeans and a shirt. “Sorry to be so early,” he said.

She shrugged and tried to ward off the weird
tension in the air. She topped off her own cup of coffee and pulled
the lease agreement from a stack of papers on the counter. Regina
had been cool to her when she stopped by Garrity’s office for the
lease. She’d simply handed over the file with a quick nod. “I
picked this up from Garrity this morning. It looks good, although
I’m no expert.” She flipped the cover of the file open and closed
again, finally passing it to Dodge and started her questions while
his attention was on the lease. “His receptionist, Regina Winslow,
and even Garrity himself seemed…concerned, I guess you’d call it,
about us doing business together.”

Dodge looked up quickly, glanced back down
at the papers. He closed the file before looking up at her again.
“You’re wondering what I did to make all these people warn you
about me? Maybe thinking you shouldn’t lease the land to me. Is
that it?”

“No.” She could hear the defensiveness in
her voice. “I just…well, I keep telling people to mind their own
business. But it seems to be on everyone’s mind as soon as they
hear your name.” She moved around the bar and took a seat on the
stool next to him. “I’ve no idea what you did in the past, but I
know I trust you. If you don’t want to explain about the rest I’ll
understand.” He tilted his head slightly and the look in his eyes
softened. “I do trust you, Dodge. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do, and
that means more to me than whatever happened long before we ever
met.”

He rubbed his neck and ran his fingers
through his hair. “I appreciate your trust, Sarah. And I’m sorry I
didn’t say anything sooner. I should have known—I did know that
you’d be faced with the rumors.” He looked down into his coffee,
ran his finger over the lip of the mug, sighed deeply. “I was
eighteen. There was this girl, Wendy Hawkins. She was nineteen, a
friend of my sister, Isabel. She was always hanging around the
house. She was real pretty. Short blond hair, curly, like that
little girl on TV.” He twisted his finger in the air around his
ear. “Shirley Temple hair. Anyway, I was young, as I mentioned, and
like all eighteen-year-old boys, I was…well, interested in her, I
guess you’d say.”

Sarah watched him, his eyes flickered
between his hands and the mug of coffee on the counter. He didn’t
look at her while he spoke, didn’t look at anything really. Her
heart was pounding in her chest, anticipation kneading away at her
like the coffee that burned in her gut.

“Hell, everybody in town knew I had the hots
for her. She was real innocent-like, but she’d flirt with me too,
when she thought nobody was looking. Anyway, one night I saw her at
a bar and was going to make my big move when she up and left with a
stranger. I followed them out, saw her drive away with the guy. She
saw me too, even laughed at what must have been the stunned look on
my face. She thought I was the only one there who knew her, but
Tommy was there too. She didn’t see him.”

His voice was toneless like he was reciting
a story he’d heard on the news. He looked up at her, seemed to
register her face and frowned. Sarah wondered what expression she
showed—panic, dread, fear--she hoped not fear.

“Seeing her with that guy kinda cured me of
wanting her. Besides, there were more fish in the sea. One night
she comes over during Sunday dinner and announces she’s pregnant.
Says I’m the daddy and acts like she’d already told me and I’d
refused to take responsibility. Pretty smart when you think about
it,” he offered with a lift of his shoulder. “Nobody ever accused
her of being stupid. Anyway, everybody thought I’d finally nailed
her and then lost interest. At least that’s what she was counting
on. It worked. My whole family thought she was telling the
truth.”

“That’s awful.” Sarah wanted to reach out
and touch him, but she could tell he wasn’t close to being
done.

“I refused to have anything to do with her.
It wasn’t my baby. Hell, I’d never even touched her and everybody
was pushing me to marry her. I could see where it was heading and I
panicked.”

Oh God, here it comes. The look on his face
was so strained, so pitiful, she knew it was going to be bad.

“I took off, just left town. Didn’t know
where I was headed or what I was going to do. I knew if I stayed
I’d be forced to marry her and be her baby’s daddy, and I was too
pigheaded to do it.”

Sarah rubbed her hands along the tops of her
thighs. “That’s it? You just left? I don’t get what the big deal
is.”

“Wendy went off the deep end a little when
word got out she was pregnant and that I’d taken off. Her family
turned her back on her. She ended up staying at our house for
awhile. It was bad for her, the guilt and the shame of it all.”

The fact that he could think about her and
how she felt after causing him to leave his home and family was a
testament to his character. Sarah’s heart broke for him, for the
boy he’d been and the man sitting before her now.

“She took a bunch of pills. Everybody
thought she was trying to get rid of the baby.” Dodge looked up
into Sarah’s eyes. “She died.”

Sarah struggled to unclench her fists and
relax her shoulders. “Oh God, Dodge, you can’t blame yourself for
what happened.”

“Doesn’t really matter if I do or not.
Everybody else does.”

Sarah stood up with a jerk, touched his
shoulder and gripped hard. “Yes, it does matter.” She touched his
face with her free hand, felt the stubble brush against her fingers
and gently pulled his face toward hers. “It does matter. You’re not
to blame for her death.”

“I didn’t say I was.”

“You didn’t say it, but you feel
responsible. I can see it on your face, hear it in your voice. Damn
it,” she all but shouted and forced her fist into the counter. “You
didn’t do anything to that girl.”

He stood up slowly and paced away to the
open deck door. Sarah followed him outside. “Didn’t Tommy stick up
for you? Tell the truth about the guy in the bar?”

“Yeah, but…his dad was a drunk.” He
shrugged. “I’d stood up for him at school a few times and people
just thought he was paying me back with a lie. Besides,” he turned
to face her. “When your own family looks at you like mine did, like
they know you’re lying, you lose the gumption to fight. It takes
the wind right out of you. It could’ve been me. If she’d have let
me, I’d have had her that night or any other. It’s a wonder I
hadn’t gotten anyone pregnant before.”

“Why don’t you tell people to go to hell?
Why don’t you defend yourself against the lies?”

“She’s dead now. She paid the ultimate
price.”

“And you haven’t paid? You left town to
protect yourself and you’ve been paying for twenty years. Don’t you
think you’ve suffered long enough?”

“This is why I don’t talk about the past. I
don’t want anybody feeling sorry for me.”

“You’d rather they believe you a
coward?”

“People believe what they want to believe.
I’d rather they blame me than smear the reputation of a dead girl.
I’m over it, Sarah. I only told you so you’d know what you’re
getting into, so you could trust me to do right by the lease.”

“I told you before I trusted you.” She
stepped forward, closed the gap between them. “I do trust you.”

All Sarah could see was him as a boy, with
no mother and no hope. It could have been one of her boys and the
thought of that made her insides turn bitter with rage.

Without a thought, she buried her face in
his chest, wrapped her arms around him and held on as if he were
adrift at sea and she were his life rope.

Dodge put his hands on her shoulders and
pushed her back out of his reach.

“God help the next person who bad mouths you
in my presence.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not why I told
you.”

“But--”

“No, Sarah. I mean it. I don’t want your
pity and I won’t have you getting in the middle of this. What’s
done is done.”

She ripped her shoulders free with a fresh
wave of anger. “I don’t pity you, Dodge. Far from it. But if you
expect me to sit idly by and let your good name be slandered, you
never should have told me.”

“Damn it,” he said on a hiss. “Just let it
go.”

“You can’t like the way people treat you.
You can’t tell me you enjoy being looked down upon.”

“I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of
me and neither should you.”

“It’s wrong. It’s been so long…” She
clenched her fists. “I don’t understand.”

“Her family’s still here. My coming back to
town has brought it all back to the surface. It’s been hard enough
on them and I won’t do anything to hurt them.”

“You may think you’re being a martyr, but
you’re just a damn fool,” she said. “What about
your
family?
This is about more than just you.”

He shook his head. “You’re afraid of what
this means to you and your family. I don’t blame you. That’s why I
told you.”

She laughed. “Oh, that’s a good one. Don’t
turn this around on me.” She poked him in the chest. “I care about
you, like it or not, and you can’t scare me away with that
bullshit. Unlike everyone else who’s ever cared about you, I don’t
give a damn what people in this town think. Hell, I don’t know any
of them enough to care. You go be someone else’s martyr and let me
deal with people in my own way.”