McKettrick's Luck (4 page)

“I
COMPLETELY BLEW IT
,” Cheyenne told her mother the moment she stepped into the house that night.

Ayanna sat on the old couch, her feet resting bare on the cool linoleum floor, crocheting something from multi-strands of variegated yarn. “How so?” she asked mildly.

The sounds of cyber-battle bounced in from the next room. Mitch was playing a video game on his laptop. Mitch was
always
playing a video game on his laptop. It was as though by shooting down animated enemies he could keep his own demons at bay.

“Jesse flatly refused to sell me the land,” Cheyenne said.

Ayanna smiled softly. “You expected that.”

Cheyenne tossed her heavy handbag onto a chair, kicked off her shoes and sighed with relief. “Yeah,” she said.

“Want something to eat?” Ayanna asked. “Mitch and I had mac-and-cheese.”

“I had soup,” Cheyenne said.

Her cell phone played its elevator song inside her bag.

“Ignore it,” Ayanna advised.

“I can't,” Cheyenne answered. She fished out the phone, flipped it open and said, “Hello, Nigel.”

“Have you made any progress?” Nigel asked.

Cheyenne looked at her watch. “Gosh, Nigel. You've shown amazing restraint. It's been at least an hour and a half since the
last
time you called.”

“You said you were on your way to have dinner with McKettrick,” Nigel reminded her. They'd talked, live via satellite, during the drive between Lucky's and the Roadhouse. “How did it go?”

Ayanna sat serenely, crocheting away.

“He said no,” Cheyenne reported.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“We're doomed.”

“Take a breath, Nigel. He agreed to look at the plans—on one condition.”

“What condition?”

“I have to look at the land. Tomorrow morning. I'm meeting him at his place at 9:00 a.m.”

“So we're still in the running?”

“Anybody's guess,” Cheyenne said wearily, moving her purse to sink into the chair herself. “Jesse's direct, if nothing else, and as soon as he knew what I wanted, he dug in his heels.”

“Maybe you shouldn't have sprung it on him so soon,” Nigel mused. Cheyenne could just see her boss's bushy brows knitting together in a thoughtful frown. She wondered if he'd ever considered investing in a weed eater, for purposes of personal grooming.

“You didn't give me any other choice, remember?”

“Don't make this
my
fault.”

“You've been breathing down my neck since I got off the plane in Phoenix yesterday morning. If you want me to do the impossible, Nigel, you've got to give me some space.”

“You
can
do this, can't you, Cheyenne?”

She felt a surge of shaky confidence. “I specialize in the impossible,” she said.

“Come through for me, babe,” Nigel wheedled.

“Don't call me
babe,
” Cheyenne responded. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother smile. “And don't bug me, either. When I have something to tell you, I'll be in touch—”

“But—”

“Goodbye, Nigel.” Cheyenne thumbed the end button.

Sounds of intense warfare burgeoned from Mitch's room.

With another sigh, Cheyenne tossed the cell phone onto a dust-free end table and rose from her chair. “You know something, Mom?” she said, brightening. “You're amazing. You've been in this house for a few hours, and already it feels like home.”

Ayanna's eyes glittered with a sudden sheen of tears. “I want to do my part, Cheyenne,” she said. “I know you think you're in this alone, but you're not. You have me, and you have Mitch.”

Cheyenne's throat knotted up. When she spoke, her voice came out as a croak. “Speaking of Mitch—”

Ayanna set aside her crochet project and stood, pointed herself in the direction of the kitchen, which, unlike those in the condos Cheyenne and Nigel planned to build, boasted none of the modern conveniences. “I'll make you some herbal tea,” Ayanna said. “Might help you sleep.”

“Thanks,” Cheyenne said and crossed to push open the partially closed door to her brother's room.

Mitch sat hunched over his computer, a refurbished model, bought with money Ayanna had probably saved from the checks Cheyenne sent every payday. He seemed so slight and fragile, slouched in his wheelchair, with a card table for a desk. Once, he'd been athletic. One of the most popular kids in school.

“Hey,” Cheyenne said.

“Hey,” Mitch responded without looking away from the laptop screen.

She considered mussing his hair, the way she'd done when he was younger, before the accident, and decided against the idea. Mitch was nineteen now, and his dignity was about all he had left.

When the deal was done, she reminded herself, she'd buy him a
real
computer, like the one she'd seen at McKettrickCo when she'd stopped in looking for Jesse earlier that day. Maybe then he'd start hoping again.

“I wish we could go back to Phoenix,” he said.

She sat down on his bed. Ayanna had brought his blankets and spread from home, put them on the rollaway that had been old when Cheyenne had left for college. Oh, yes, Ayanna had tried, but the room was depressing, just the same. The wallpaper was peeling, and the curtains looked as though they'd been through at least one flood. The linoleum floor was scuffed, with the pattern worn away in several places.

“What's in Phoenix?” she asked lightly, though she knew. In the low-income housing where he and Ayanna lived, he'd had friends. He'd had cable TV, and there was a major library across from the apartment building, with computers. Here, he had an old laptop and a rollaway bed.

Mitch merely shrugged, but he shut down the game and swiveled his chair around so he could face Cheyenne.

“Things are gonna get better,” she said.

“That's what Mom says, too,” Mitch replied, but he didn't sound as if he believed it.

Cheyenne studied her brother. She and Mitch had different fathers; hers was dead, his was God knew where. Ten years ago, when she'd left Indian Rock, he'd been nine and she'd been seventeen. When Ayanna had followed her second husband, Pete, to Phoenix, dragging Mitch along with her, Cheyenne had been in her sophomore year at the University of Arizona, scrambling to keep up her grades and hold on to her night job. Mitch had written her a plaintive letter, begging her to come home, so the two of them could stay in this rundown shack of a house. He'd loved Indian Rock then—loved the singular freedoms of growing up in a small town.

She'd replied with a postcard, scrawled on her break at Hooters, telling him to
get real.
She wasn't about to come back, and even if she did, Ayanna would never agree to let them live alone, with Gram gone.
You'll like Phoenix,
she'd said.

“I'm sorry, Mitch,” she said now, after swallowing her heart. It was true that Ayanna wouldn't have let her children stay there, if only because she'd needed the pittance she'd received for renting the place out, but there were gentler ways of refusing.

“For what?” he asked.

“Everything,” she answered.

“It wasn't your fault,” Mitch told her. “The accident, I mean.”

I could have come back, gotten a job at the Roadhouse or Lucky's, waiting tables. I could have paid Ayanna some rent, and probably gotten something from the state to help with the cost of raising my little brother. If I'd even tried…

“It wouldn't have happened if we'd been here,” she said.

“Who knows?” he asked. “Maybe it was fate—maybe I'd have rolled that four-wheeler anyhow.”

Cheyenne closed her eyes against the images that were always hovering at the edge of her consciousness: Mitch, sixteen and foolish, joyriding in the desert with friends on “four-wheelers”—all-terrain vehicles designed for the hopelessly reckless. The rollover and critical spine injury. The rush to the hospital after her mother's frantic call, the long vigil in the waiting room outside Intensive Care, when nobody knew if Mitch would live or die.

The surgeries.

The slow, excruciating recovery.

Cheyenne had been just starting to make a name for herself at Meerland then. She'd driven back and forth between San Diego and Phoenix, armed with a company laptop and a cell phone. She'd held on stubbornly and worked hard, determined to prove to Nigel that she could succeed.

And she had. While spelling an exhausted Ayanna at the hospital—Pete, husband number two and Mitch's dad, had fled when he'd realized he was expected to behave like a responsible adult—she'd struck up a friendship with one of her brother's surgeons and had eventually persuaded him to invest in Meerland. When his profits were impressive, he'd brought several of his colleagues onboard.

Mitch had gradually gotten better, until he was well enough to leave the hospital, and Cheyenne had gone back to San Diego and thrown all her energies into her job.

“Do you think we could get a dog?”

Cheyenne blinked. Returned to the here-and-now with a thump. “A dog?”

Mitch smiled, and that was such a rare thing that it made her heart skitter over a beat. “We couldn't have one at the apartment,” he said.

“But you'll be going back—”

“I'm never going back,” Mitch said with striking certainty.

“What makes you say that?”

“We don't have to pay rent here,” he answered. “Mom's talking about painting again, and getting a job waiting tables or selling souvenirs someplace. She'll probably meet some loser and make it her life's mission to save him from himself.”

For all her intelligence, Ayanna had the kind of romantic history that would provide material for a week of Dr. Phil episodes. At least she hadn't married again after Pete.

Tears burned in Cheyenne's eyes, and she was glad the room was lit only by Mitch's computer screen and the tacky covered-wagon lamp on the dresser.

“I wish—” Mitch began when Cheyenne didn't,
couldn't,
speak, but his voice fell away.

“What, Mitch?” she asked, after swallowing hard. “What do you wish?”

“I wish I could have a job, and a girlfriend. I wish I could ride a horse.”

Cheyenne didn't know what to say. Jobs were few and far between in Indian Rock, especially for the disabled. Girls Mitch's age were working, going to college, dating men who could take them places. And riding horses? That was for people with two good legs and more courage than good sense.

“Isn't there something else?” she said, almost whispering.

Mitch smiled sadly, turned away again and brought the war game back up on his computer screen.
Blip-blip-kabang.

Cheyenne sat helplessly on the bed for a few moments, then got to her feet, laid a hand briefly on her brother's shoulder, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

 

T
HE HEADLIGHTS OF
J
ESSE'S
truck swept across the old log schoolhouse his great-great-great grandfather, Jeb McKettrick, had built for his teacher bride, Chloe. Jesse's sisters had used the place as a playhouse when they were kids, and Jesse, being a decade younger, had made a fort of it. Now, on the rare occasions when his parents came back to the ranch, it served as an office.

He pulled up beside the barn, and the motion lights came on.

Inside, he checked on the horses, six of them altogether, though the number varied. They'd been fed and turned out for some exercise that morning, before he'd left for town, but he added flakes of dried Bermuda grass to their feeders now just the same, to make up for being gone so long.

They were forgiving, like always, and grateful for the attention he gave them.

He took the time to groom them, one by one, but eventually, there was nothing to do but face that empty house.

It was big; generations of McKettricks had added on to it—a room here, a story there. Now that his folks spent the majority of their time in Palm Beach, playing golf and socializing, and Victoria and Sarah were busy jet-setting with their wealthy husbands, Jesse was the unofficial owner.

He entered through the kitchen door, switched on the lights.

The house his cousins, Meg and Sierra, owned was reportedly haunted. Jesse often wished this one was, too, because at least then he wouldn't have been alone.

He went to the walk-in Sub-Zero, took out a beer and popped the top. What he ought to do was get a dog, but he was gone too much. It wouldn't be fair to consign some poor unsuspecting mutt to a lonely life, just so he could come home to somebody who'd always be happy to see him.