Samson and Sunset (40 page)

  “Shay, where are we going? Not to our
house, I’m not ready for that.”

  “I want to show you something,
Callie.” He squeezed my knee.

  I didn’t even question him. I just
cuddled up close. We could be going to Timbuktu for all I cared, as
long as it was with Shay.

  We drove down the gravel road to the
circle-drive and right up to the Big House. He stopped, shut the
car off, then caressed and kissed and held me for a very long time,
just like he used to when we were dating. He was being the sweet,
tender Shay I knew and loved. We sat out there and did some
extremely precious necking.

  Then he whispered in my ear, “My
parents are in Chicago, but I’d like to show you their house.”

  He opened the door of the car, got out
and helped me out. He took hold of my hand like we were two
teenagers in high school and took us into the Big House through the
big doors. “This,” he said, “is my parents’ house.”

  Then without letting go of my
hand—seemed like he wasn’t letting me out of his sight—he led me to
the kitchen and got two glasses of iced tea. He put orange juice in
one and gave it to me, then went over and flipped on the music.
With a glass of tea in one hand and holding my hand with the other,
he walked me directly to the master suite.

  “This is my parents’ bedroom,” he
said, “but it’s more than that to me. Let me tell you about this
room, my princess. This is the room where I made love for the very
first time in my life, to the
love
of my life, my soul mate,
a beautiful innocent girl who had experienced sex, but not love.
This is where I was able to show that woman, by coming inside of
her life, what it was like to experience something so great, that
even I learned from that night, unexpectedly. She ended up teaching
me. This is the room where my life found new meaning, where I knew
my days as a single man were numbered.”

  Shay took our two glasses and set them
on the nightstand. Then he turned toward me and gently started to
undress me, oh so gently. He ran his hands around my naked body and
kissed my breasts. “God, you taste so good, Callie, I’ve missed you
so much.”

  I had unbuttoned his shirt, and he let
it drop off of his beautiful body, then he picked me up and put me
in the middle of the king-sized bed.

  The foreplay alone seemed to go on for
hours. At one point as Shay ran his hands between my legs and said,
“You’re turned on, baby. I can tell you’re really turned on.”

  “Shay, I’ve been turned on since we
were on the dance floor. I’m aching inside of my life. I can’t take
much more of this foreplay.”

  “Well, princess, do you remember the
five little magic words?”

  I wasn’t shy anymore, and believe me,
this time around, I knew those five magic words. “Please make love
to me.”

  “Oh yes, my princess, I will do just
that.”

  It was so intense that when I climaxed
I left fingernail scratches down Shay’s back. My toes curled up and
locked. He winced a second from the pain of my nails, and then he
was right along there with me, climaxing. We still had our timing.
Afterward, I went limp. My eyes flooded with tears. In a second
Shay was on top of me with his arms braced on the bed, his face
about nine inches from my face.

  “Look at me, Callie,” he said, “look
into my eyes.”

  It was hard to see anything. I had to
blink all the tears away. I was looking up at him and our eyes
locked together. I could see his big beautiful brown eyes through
my tears.

  “Kathrine Mitchell Westover, I promise
you that for the rest of my life, from this day forward, I, Shay,
your husband, will never ever step out on you again.” I felt
teardrops from Shay’s eyes falling on my face like warm raindrops.
“You have my solemn word.”

  “Oh, Shay, thank you, thank you,” I
cried. “I love you so much!”

  Shay just held me.

  Without speaking about it, we knew we
would never be apart again.

  There is nothing more beautiful than
to fall in love all over again with your own spouse. It can be a
wake-up call if we change the things that made our spouses
withdraw. Go win them back. Shay and I were more into ourselves at
this time than thinking of those two heartbroken children.

  I stayed the night and Shay and I had
breakfast together in the morning. I’d called Mom and she said not
to worry about anything, she’d see the children off to school.
After breakfast we went right back to bed for an all day lovemaking
session. We were complete again.

  In the afternoon, Shay ran over to our
house and got us some clean jeans, sweatshirts and Keds. Then we
showered together, dressed and jumped in the Impala, headed for
Hudson to pick up the kids from school. I wanted to surprise
them.

  As we were driving down the gravel
road, I yelled, “Stop, Shay! Stop!”

  I think I scared the poor guy half out
of his wits.

  He hit the brake. “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s a kitten back there by the
road, we have to go get it. We can’t leave it there alone.”

  Shay looked into my eyes and smiled,
opened the door, and walked back to see if he could see the kitten.
Sure enough, after about ten paces he bent down and picked it up.
When he got back to the car, he handed me a little
tortoiseshell-colored kitty.

  “You and your strays.” He shook his
head. “I swear, woman, you’d take them all home if you could.”

  We headed on into Hudson and picked
the kids up at school. They were shocked to see Mom and Dad
together. When they saw we looked happy they both got broad grins
on their faces and gave each other high fives; more high fives when
we told them they would be going back to school in Westover with
all their friends. What could make any child happier than seeing
their parents back together? Our pain had torn their lives apart,
but now we were putting it all back together.

  They were excited about the kitten
too, already squabbling over whose it would be. We went out for
supper as a family, and Shay called Hulda so she could get the
house ready for our return. Shay stayed with us at Mom’s that
night, assuring me several times when I asked that he hadn’t had a
woman there since the night that started it all. Well, if Shay was
saying it, it was true. My mother was so happy that Shay and I had
reconciled.

  We were finally home and in our own
beds and let me say, I don’t think Shay and I got much sleep that
week. When Sterling and Maggie arrived home they were thrilled to
have us back where we belonged, even Sterling; I could see it in
his face. They took us out for dinner on Sunday to the Golden Spur
Steakhouse and Sterling toasted to a reunion that would always
remain an unbreakable union.

  1979-1980

  The Discovery

  Sterling had been working on a project
since he retired: he was building Maggie her dream ranch house, a
mile or so away from the Big House. Every woman in the Seventies
wanted a ranch house.

  Life was back on track, and I never
missed a chance to ravish Shay’s gorgeous body. Every morning we
waited with bated breath for the school bus to come and get the
kids.

  I once asked Shay if he thought we
should buy a book with sexual positions in it.

  “Are you kidding? We could have
written the book!” he said proudly.

  “Shay, are we over sexed?”

  “Why, do you want to cut down?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I think we
should do it even more if we can work it in!”

  “Well,” he said with his Shay-grin,
“Callie, I can always work it in.”

  The kids were now fourteen and
sixteen. Kelly was old enough to get her driver’s license, so Shay
bought her a car. It was only two years old and she was thrilled.
Wes was more thrilled than Kelly that she could drive, I’m sure he
thought that gave the two of them their freedom. Well, think again
kids! Shay was a very good father, kind and reasonable, but he was
also strict. He didn’t believe in corporal punishment. Instead he’d
sit them down at the table for The Talk and let them tell him what
they thought they’d done wrong. He let them tell him how they
thought they could do better, and usually he had them think of
their own punishment. Oh, he’d grounded them a few times, but the
only person in the family he’d ever spanked was me, that one time.
Of course, I’d never let the kids know about that; they’d never let
me live it down!

  The kids wanted to drive to school but
since the bus drove right into the farmstead to pick up the
farmhands’ children, Shay made them take the bus. He did let them
drive in for special occasions. He had worked it out with Kelly
that she had to earn her car by cleaning the stable every Saturday
if Lucas was there. If he wasn’t, she had to wait until one of us
could be there. He never told Kelly why. “It’s just a rule you
can’t break,” he said. I know Shay didn’t want a repeat of what had
happened to Maggie and me.

  ***

Both of our children had a special friend in
their life of the opposite sex. Kelly had been dating a nice boy
named Randy for a little over a year, while Wes seemed to have a
new girl every couple of weeks; that boy was his father’s son. Like
Shay, Wes was going to be tall. He had big dark brown eyes and that
I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude like Shay. He never worried about his
grades, but they weren’t bad. Granted, he wasn’t going to get a
scholarship or anything, but he didn’t want one. He was a jock,
very popular. Hell, he wasn’t going to college anyway, he told us.
He wanted to run the farmstead or be a pro-baseball player.

  Wes did things that just cracked Shay
and me up. One day I was looking out of the kitchen window,
watching Wes cart all these boards out back from the shop. He
stacked them in piles by size; then he went and got a toolbox and a
saw.

  “Shay, come here,” I said quizzically,
“look at what your son is doing.”

  Shay stood there looking out the
kitchen window with as much of an amazed look on his face as I had.
“What the hell is he doing?”

  We never said anything to Wes, just
continued to watch him out of the kitchen window for the next few
days.

  Finally, he had this huge contraption
built.

  “What the hell
is
that?” Shay
asked me with a little chuckle.

  A couple days later, Shay and I were
sitting at the kitchen table in the afterglow of an afternoon romp,
drinking iced tea, when Wes came in the back door. He went to the
refrigerator, got out three cans of pop, opened one and chugged it
as we sat there watching in silence, then opened the other two and
poured them down the drain.

  “Hey, Mom, Dad, come outside. I want
to show you what I built.”

  He didn’t have to ask us twice. We
were up from the table and out the door, on our way to the see what
our son had concocted. Wes took a long narrow board and stood it
straight up in the air. Then he put three pop cans in a row at the
very opposite end of this big narrow handle that was nailed to a
kind of wooden box.

  “Now watch.” Wes pulled down a
handle.

  This moved it to a board that moved
several other boards, eventually connecting to a huge six-by-six
pressure board, which slid heavily onto the first pop can, crushing
it. Then it crushed the second and then the third can. He’d built
the first can crusher we’d ever seen, made in 1979.

  Wes had a mechanical mind, just like
his father. Shay and I looked at each other in true amazement. That
was our Wes; there was no doubt he was Shay’s son.

  Now our Kelly was sixteen and really
quite the lady. She was a no-nonsense girl, unlike Wes. She was a
horsewoman, had raised several of Samson and Sunset’s foals and
trained them to show. She was in the Moonlight Rider’s Club, 4-H,
and always entered the County and State Fairs. Her wall was full of
ribbons and trophies. She used to try to trick ride, but I wouldn’t
watch that. It was a mother’s nightmare.

  Kelly had green eyes like my dad, with
long wavy dark-brown hair. She was about five feet, four inches and
still growing. Her grades were excellent; she was always doing
homework. She wanted to be a veterinarian. I tried to get her to
think about being a nurse and join the Gray Angels Program at the
Hudson Hospital, something you could do when you turned fifteen. It
didn’t pay much, but it helped young girls decide if they might
want a career in nursing.

  I always thought I’d have liked to
have been a nurse, helping people feel better was something I knew
I’d love doing. But that didn’t interest Kelly; she wanted to work
with animals. Well, all right then. We told her we’d support
anything she decided to do.

  Our kids always had friends out to the
farmstead. Teens loved coming to our house. Sterling and Maggie
were very generous about them using the tennis courts and the pool.
One day we were going to Sunday dinner at the Big House and Kelly
asked if she could invite Randy next Sunday. We said sure, we had
no problem with that; Maggie and Sterling would love it.

  Next Sunday came and we went to dinner
at the Big House as usual. We were instructed with all the do’s and
don’ts by Kelly before we got there. She wanted us on our best
behavior for Randy. No kissing, necking, and acting like a couple
of lovesick teenagers. When we finally all got to the table, Shay
and Sterling couldn’t contain themselves. Questions like, “Well
now, what are your intentions, young man?” and “What do you plan on
doing for the rest of your life?” just somehow slipped into
conversation. But this was nothing compared to Wes, he was
relentless. He couldn’t wait to tell Randy all of Kelly’s faults
and the dumb things he thought she’d done.

  We got through dinner and when dessert
was served, Sterling said he’d like to have the floor for a minute.
Everyone turned to him while he stood up, addressing Shay and
me.