Once in a Blue Moon (26 page)

Melissa’s cheeks heated
and her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth--

“
And perhaps you can shut your trap,
Miss High-and-Mighty
.”

Melissa turned,
surprised to see Hannah behind her, angrily glaring at the
seamstress.

Hannah beckoned Jessica
over. “Until you can make a dress that’s the quality and style of
this one, I suggest you mind your manners.”

The seamstress looked
at Jessica’s dress, studied it for a long moment, slowly flushing
an unbecoming pink, turned and left.

Melissa stared at
Hannah, a funny feeling in her chest. Melissa knew Hannah didn’t
care much for her. But besides Richard, Melissa couldn’t think of
one other person who’d ever defended Melissa in her life. She
wasn’t the type to need defending. She didn’t know what to
think.

She swallowed and,
unbelievably, realized she was on the verge of grateful tears.
“Hannah...I...well...thank you.”

Hannah shrugged and
looked away, obviously embarrassed. She placed something in the
barrel, then turned and left without another word.

Melissa watched her go.
She shook her head and her tears dried, but the feeling of
gratitude persisted.

It looked like she
might have a friend.

Children’s voices called out, and giggles and shrieks drifted
through the open doorway. “
Ghost in the
graveyard
!”

Melissa dried and put
away the last dish, and looked outside the cabin. The community had
come alive. Chairs had been brought outside, a table complete with
tablecloth was set up in the freshly cut, green grass in front of
Sarah’s cabin, and the ladies were dishing out dessert to the
husbands, and quite a few single men from the bunkhouse.

A handful of children
ran by the table, grabbed some cookies and headed back into the
fray, shrieking, laughing, and running from the ‘ghost in the
graveyard’, who at the moment was Jeremy. A couple of dogs barked,
dashing to and fro, adding to the racket. Everyone looked like they
were having fun.

Melissa wouldn’t mind
having some fun too. She went outside and noticed the dessert
table--peach cobbler and cookies–-and belatedly realized she should
have contributed too. She paused, wishing she hadn’t come out after
all, but it was too late to turn back, so she closed the distance.
“Hi.”

Sarah smiled at her.
“Hi, yourself. Come and join us.”

Melissa’s hands bunched
in her skirt. “Sorry, but I didn’t make any dessert.”

“Don’t worry, there’s
plenty.” Amanda lifted a brow. “Besides, I’ve tasted some of your
cooking.”

It took Melissa a
moment to realize she was being teased, and another moment to
realize she didn’t mind. She smiled and chuckled.

Amanda winked at
her.

The men, arguing about
something, wandered off into a separate group.

Melissa took a seat as
the light breeze in the warm air wafted the sweet smell of peaches
from the orchard. She looked around. She still couldn’t believe
Hannah had stuck up for her like she had. “Where’s Hannah?”

Emma, frizzy blonde
hair lifting in the breeze, shook her head. “Keeping busy. She
doesn’t usually come outside on Sundays.”

Sarah nodded. “She
misses all the fun. I think she’d rather work than socialize.”

Melissa realized she
herself had used work as an excuse to avoid company on more than
one occasion. And to Melissa, Hannah seemed like an outcast. Was
that how people saw Melissa? Perhaps she had more in common with
Hannah than she was comfortable with.

The children ran by
again, laughing, and Melissa was glad to see her kids having so
much fun.

The men erupted in
shouts and Melissa glanced over at Richard. He had thrown a
horseshoe, and dirt puffed up in the air where it landed. He turned
to strut and boastfully taunt the other men as they laughed. He was
good at having fun. That was one of the qualities that had
originally attracted Melissa all those years ago.

“Try this.” Sarah
handed Melissa a bowl of peach cobbler with whipped cream on
top.

Melissa spared a
thought to calories, but wasn’t too worried. She worked so hard
every day that she burned them off and then some.

She took a bite and
closed her eyes blissfully. “Mmm. Wonderful!”

“I’m glad you like it.”
Sarah smiled at her.

It
was
wonderful. Years of depriving herself of dessert had her
moaning as she ate the buttery oats, sweet peaches and creamy
topping, much to the other ladies amusement.

The men continued to
play horseshoes. One of the shoes got lost in the long,
wheat-colored grass by the fence and Sarah’s husband, a lanky
redhead, went after it. When he couldn’t find it, the other men
mocked him for his rotten throw.

The women chatted as
Melissa finished her dessert. She placed the bowl in a tub on the
ground with dirty dishes in it, then determined to have some fun
too. Unfortunately, she didn’t know many games. She remembered the
request for lessons. “Would you ladies still like to learn a little
self-defense?”

The three women looked
at her expectantly.

Amanda nodded. “That
would be nice.”

The other two ladies
agreed.

Melissa motioned them
to the front of the table and faced them a little nervously. “Okay.
We’ll start with dislodging an attacker’s hand.”

Emma
put a hand to her scrawny chest, a look of horror on her face.
“An
attacker
?”

Her
voice, reminiscent of Vivian Leigh from
Gone With The Wind
, had Melissa
smiling. “Yes. What if someone tried to attack you? Let’s say a man
grabs you by--”

Emma was shaking her
head. “My husband would never allow any man to attack me.”

Sarah and Amanda
exchanged a glance and a smile. Perhaps denial was normal behavior
for Emma? Melissa tried again. “It’s a rhetorical question. What
I’m trying to say is--”

”Yes,” Sarah nodded
vigorously. “If anyone tried something like that, they’d be
lynched.”

Amanda agreed with a
nod. “Or worse.”

Melissa bit back her
frustration. This was going nowhere fast. “But what if your husband
weren’t present?”

“Then another of the
men would step in.” Sarah made the statement sound like fact.

Melissa took a deep
breath. “But what if no one was around and you had only yourself to
depend upon?”

Sarah looked surprised
by the question. “Where would we be, where no one else was
around?”

Melissa sighed. “Okay.
On the very unlikely chance that you were in an isolated location,
and were caught unawares, and there were no men around to help you,
and a lunatic, who’d escaped from an asylum, came upon you
and--”

“If a lunatic escaped
from an asylum, my husband would never leave me alone until he’d
been caught,” Amanda assured her.

Emma nodded. “Besides,
we don’t have an asylum around these parts.”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “But if you
did
have an asylum--”

Sarah shook her head.
“They’d never build one around here. But down in Mexico they might.
They have prisons down there. But the prisoners never escape.”

Melissa took a deep
breath. “Okay,” she used her hand for emphasis. “Say you lived in
Mexico next to an insane asylum, which stood next to a prison, and
in the middle of the night there was an earthquake, and both the
prison and the asylum walls fell down and a lot of crazy criminals
escaped, and--”

“I’d
never live next to a prison.” Amanda shuddered. “What if
someone
did
escape? Besides, I don’t think they have earthquakes in
Mexico like we do here in California.”

Melissa shut her eyes
and pressed her fingers to her forehead. “You are missing the
point.” She opened her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is...”

She looked into three
pairs of teasing eyes and her own widened.

They were kidding!

They
were
teasing
her!

A wonderful feeling of
acceptance welled up within her. She jumped up, grabbed the spoon
with a dollop of cream on the end and advanced threateningly toward
Amanda who grinned and backed away.

Melissa narrowed her
eyes. “Say someone you know, who happens to live next door to you,
is driven insane by your smart mouth, and she chases you down and
attacks you in front of a dozen witnesses, before anyone can come
to your rescue!”

Melissa lunged toward
Amanda with the cream.

Amanda shrieked and ran
around the table.

Melissa followed.

Sarah and Emma laughed
and backed away.

Amanda held up both
hands. “All right! I concede! I need to learn to defend
myself!”

With a laugh, Melissa
threw the spoon back in the cream. She glanced at the men to see
them all grinning. Richard looked especially happy.

She ignored him and
turned to the three not very penitent women. “All right then,
listen up.”

* * *

Later that night,
Melissa lay in bed next to a sleeping Richard and watched shadows
dance gently on the board ceiling above her head. The night sounds
had quieted, the children had drifted off to sleep, and Melissa
realized she was smiling.

She was warm,
comfortable, cosy under the cool sheets, her pillow was soft
beneath her head, and she felt...content. All in all, it had been a
pretty good day.

First Hannah had stuck
up for her, and then she’d had fun with the Cowboy Wives. It almost
felt like she had friends.

She turned onto her
side and put an arm around Richard.

His hand came up to cup
her elbow and give it a squeeze before he dropped his arm onto the
bed again.

She kissed Richard’s
back and snuggled into his heat.

Perhaps tomorrow would
be even better. She remembered Sarah’s warning that they had
laundry in the morning and groaned.

She pressed closer to
Richard, closed her eyes and tried to drift off to sleep. What was
the saying? It’s a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to
live there?

She realized the smile
was back on her face again. Well, she might not want to live here
forever, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to stay just a bit longer.

A few weeks later,
Jeremy and Jessica came running inside the cabin. Jeremy’s face was
beaming. “Mom! Come with us! We have to show you something down at
the creek!”

Jessica nodded. “Hurry!
It’s amazing!”

Melissa first reaction
was to put them off. She didn’t want to go. She’d finally stolen a
minute for herself to draw on some paper Hannah had given her.
Melissa suspected the gift hadn’t been given out of the kindness of
Hannah’s heart, but rather to get rid of Melissa. Either way, she
was drawing new designs. And granted, she felt a little silly
because they were western in style, but still, there was no one to
see and she was enjoying herself.

She opened her mouth to
refuse their invitation, looked into their bright, excited faces,
and couldn’t do it. She put down her charcoal stick. “All right.
Where are we going?”

Jessica squealed. “Come
on!”

Melissa wiped her hands
and followed. Their cheerful faces made her smile and she felt,
more and more, that she was doing the right by her kids; becoming a
better mother.

Melissa waved at the
widow and Hannah as she walked by the garden, and couldn’t pass up
the opportunity to try the friendship thing again. “Hannah, we’re
going somewhere exciting! Do you want to go with us?”

Hannah shook her head
and turned away.

The widow, grim-faced,
watched Melissa for a moment, before plucking a few plum tomatoes
and placing them in a basket.

Melissa frowned,
wondering where the disapproval came from. Who knew what made the
old bat tick?

As they walked away
from the ranch and toward the fields to the north, Melissa realized
that, for the most part, their days had fallen into a routine.
Richard went to work early; some days he took Jeremy, some he
didn’t. Jessica and Melissa, more often than not, joined the ladies
in some undertaking: churning butter, cooking, communal laundry,
the slaughtering of a hog, raiding honey from bees, preserving
vegetables, fruit, gardening, whatever. The list was endless.

They walked for about
twenty minutes, the kids talking and giggling as they got closer to
the main road.

Jessica turned to
smile. “I think this is where the Davidsons’ house is in the
future.” She pointed. “And this is about where their trampoline
stands. Can you believe how different it looks?”

Melissa wasn’t sure who
the Davidsons’ were, but she nodded.

“It does look
different.”

Jessica pointed. “And that’s where the Nortons live. Ericka
is going to
freak
when I tell her about all this.”

“I doubt she’ll believe
you, but I sincerely hope you soon get the chance.” Melissa looked
around at the trees, bushes, long grass, and dirt. The subdivisions
were gone. Or more accurately, hadn’t been built yet.

Everything was so wild
now. Realizing they’d come quite far from the ranch and to an
isolated area, Melissa glanced around at the slight hills and
foliage uneasily. “Are there any wild animals around here?”

Jeremy shook his head.
“No, Willie says there’s nothing that’ll hurt us.”

Melissa’s gaze
continued to wander the harsh terrain. “Hmm, well as long as Willie
says so. What about marauding Indians?”

Jeremy laughed. “No, not anymore. But Merrill says his cousin
got scalped and his whole family was killed about twenty years ago
in Ohio. And one of his dad’s friends died and was mutilated at the
battle of Little Bighorn. Can you
even
believe that?”