The Last Chance Ranch (16 page)

“Good luck.”

Tonio nodded and left, and for the first time, Tanya saw that his walk, too, belonged to Victor—a long-legged lope.

“Why,” Tanya said to Desmary, watching him walk toward the bus stop, “would any girl in her right mind choose Edwin Salazar over a boy like Tonio?”

Desmary looked past Tanya to the road. “Bad boys are more exciting.”

Tanya nodded. Who had she chosen, after all? She turned to look at the old woman. “I find myself wanting to teach them, somehow, those girls. Teach them how to choose a man who is worthy of them.” On a rising tide of regret and worry, she punched the dough in her bowl. “I want to wash their faces so their pretty skin shines through, and put them in clothes that don’t make them look like twenty-year-olds.” She paused to look at Desmary. “I want them to know they don’t have to give themselves away.”

“It will come, child,” Desmary said. “You’ll be a fine teacher for them, when it’s time. Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You have things of your own to work out.”

“I know.” Tanya smiled. “And I have you to teach me.”

“Long life doesn’t necessarily make a woman wise.”

“That’s true. But I think you were born wise.”

“No, child.” Desmary sighed, and her eyes wore a faraway look. “I earned every morsel of everything I ever knew. The hard way, just like everybody else.”

Tanya smiled. “The way I’m learning it.”

Desmary seemed to bring herself into focus. “He knows, I think.”

“Knows what? Who?”

“Tonio knows—or is beginning to guess—that you are his mother.”

A cold finger stabbed her chest. “Why do you say that? Did he say something to you?”

“No I just sense it.”

With a sigh, Tanya nodded. “I think so, too.”

“Are you ready for it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I honestly don’t know.”

Dear Antonio,

I’m in a work camp now. It’s not nearly as restrictive as either of the other places. We work outside sometimes, and for the first time, I can see the horizon.

Every now and then lately, I realize I might really get out of here someday. I might really see you again.

I wrote to Ramón a few weeks ago. It wasn’t easy to find him, actually, but one of the Sisters who come out here to teach and minister helped me track him down. I guess you’re living on a ranch now. I haven’t heard from him yet, but I guess he hasn’t had time, either. I feel anxious, wondering if he’ll help me talk to the right people to get the restriction against seeing you lifted. The lawyer I talked to here said I have a good chance of getting it overturned. The climate for women who have committed crimes like mine is very different now.

It made it real to me, writing to Ramón. Made me try to imagine how you might look now, at fourteen. I imagined you on a horse, looking like your dad when I first met him. That probably isn’t too far from the truth.

With high spirits and lots of love, Mom

A
bout 2:00, Ramón came into the kitchen. “Desmary, can I steal your helper this afternoon? I want to get her input on some more plans for this dance.”

“About time, I’d say,” Desmary replied. “You only have ten days.”

“There isn’t that much to do! You have the food covered, right?”

“Only a little—you haven’t given me any menus.”

“I’ll take care of the rest,” Tanya said. “Make a list of what you’ve already planned, and I’ll fancy up the rest.”

“Good girl.” Desmary swiveled on her stool—she had everything set up so she had to stand or walk as little as possible—and tugged out a scrap of paper and a pencil. She licked the pencil and started scribbling.

What else needs taking care of?” Tanya asked Ramón. She met his eyes, and blushed feverishly at the look in them. Wickedly, he winked.

“The counselors have taken care of the invitations, the letters to parents, both at the school and here. Any girl who comes out here has to have parental permission.”

“Will any of them give it?” Tanya asked.

“What do you think? We have a bus going to town to pick them up and one to take them back. The parents don’t have to do a thing.” He watched Desmary writing. “We have to read it,
abuelita
.”

“I can read it,” Tanya said, as Desmary smacked his arm.

“We have to come up with decorations and music and maybe some kind of game, so we can give prizes. I’ve got movie passes and roller skating passes. We ought to come up with something else, too.”

“Okay.” Tanya inclined her head. “Why not a dance contest or something like that?”

“That might work.”

Desmary handed the list of food to Tanya, who scanned the paper quickly and folded it to put in her jeans pocket. “Sure you’ll be all right without me?”

A bright twinkle brightened Desmary’s eyes. “I’m fine. You two go on.”

“Good.”

Tanya fetched her jacket and purse from her room, and met Ramón on the front steps. “Ready.”

“Me, too,” he said in a husky voice.

Tanya smiled.

Edwin was in the yard, raking leaves beneath the path of cottonwoods that lined the road to town. He paused to salute ironically at the pair of them. “Don’t forget to bag the leaves,” Ramón called.

Edwin lifted an orange trash bag, printed with a jack-o-lantern. “Gotcha.”

As they climbed into his truck, Tanya asked Ramón, “Why isn’t Edwin in school?”

“He has been suspended. And last night, there was an altercation in the dorms. Guess who was at the center of it, as usual? He’s right on the edge. Won’t be long now till he either hangs himself with his behavior and ends up in the state detention center, or realizes he doesn’t have a prayer unless he straightens up.”

“I know where I’ll put my money,” Tanya said darkly.

“You really don’t like him, do you?”

“No, I really don’t. Gut instinct.”

“Well, I’m obligated to see that he gets the same chance as everyone else.”

“I know. I wasn’t suggesting he should have less of a chance.” She pursed her lips, wondering if she ought to mention the letter Tonio had written to Teresa. She had the feeling Tonio had spilled his emotions to her because he trusted her to say nothing, and since Edwin wouldn’t be in school today, perhaps there would be no trouble over the letter anyway. She chose to keep quiet.

About a mile from the ranch, Ramón pulled the truck over under a copse of lonely trees.

“What are you doing?” Tanya asked.

“This.” He moved out from behind the steering wheel and slid over the bench seat until Tanya was neatly trapped between him and the door. She smiled up at him. “You’re making me a sandwich?”

“Only if I can eat you,” he said with a wicked lift of one dark brow. His lips claimed hers, wet and hungry and sensual. “Mmm,” he said, rubbing her arm. “I’ve been dying to do that all morning.”

“Maybe I ought to cool you down, then,” Tanya teased in return, and stuck her cold hands under his shirt.

He jumped. “I’ll get you for that, woman.”

“I’m real scared.”

The dark eyes sobered, and he touched her face. “Never be afraid of me, cricket. Not ever.”

Tanya gripped his shirt front, thinking of what she’d told Desmary this morning about young girls. This was the sort of man she wanted for all the women of the world—a kind man, a good one, who could love children and tend animals and make love like Casanova himself. What more could any woman ask than Ramón Quezada? “I’ll never be afraid of you, Ramón.” She kissed him, her eyes open so she didn’t have to stop looking into the depths of those rich, promising eyes.

His hand, cold as her own, snaked under her sweater and bra and closed on her breast. Tanya squealed and tried to squirm away. “Paybacks,” he said, and laughing, kissed her quickly, then let her go.

* * *

The afternoon was filled with the same kind of teasing, all of it edged with a giving sensuality Tanya had never experienced. With Victor, sex had been a dark and deadly serious thing.

Not so with Ramón. At the library, he stood behind her, very close, and, making sure no one could see him, bent to nibble her ear until her knees were weak. He caught her in a deserted section and pressed her back against the wall and kissed her senseless, then walked away whistling as if he’d done nothing. At the restaurant where they stopped for coffee, he leaned over and whispered naughty descriptions of what he wanted to do to her body when he got her alone again. Tanya blushed, but his words were poetically couched and never crude—the pictures they made in her mind made her hips soft.

Under the table, she teased back, letting her hand drift higher and higher on his leg as he talked. When she neared her destination—then stopped just short—his whispering ceased and Tanya looked up mischievously. “You were saying?”

He laughed.

They stopped by the clinic so Tanya could have her stitches removed, and the cut looked red and raw, but she could tell it would be fine. A thin scar might remain, but not much of one.

The last stop was the drugstore. Tanya waited in the truck while he went in. Teenagers, recently released from school, milled in the streets of the small town. Some of them hung on the corner talking, in the ancient tradition of those too young or too poor to drive. A gaggle of girls, their eyes lined with thick black liner, hair teased over their foreheads, walked together toward the drugstore. A young couple, a slim small girl and a long-limbed boy, strolled down the street, in no hurry to be anywhere. Tanya watched them, caught in their yearning discomfort. The boy leaned close, then away. The girl swayed his direction, then caught herself. From the back, it was impossible to tell how old they were. Tanya smiled when the boy managed to capture the girl’s hand, and she looked up at him, and they kissed, awkwardly at first, then with more passion.

Tanya glanced away, unwilling to intrude. But a small detail of something snagged her peripheral vision and she glanced back. The backpack the boy carried had a large green political button pinned to it—and Tanya knew just what it said: Save the Rainforest.

It was Tonio. Now she could tell, even at this distance, even though his clothes and hair were the same as a half a dozen other boys on the street. No doubt the girl was the infamous Teresa, who looked impossibly small to be the center of such a tempest.

Ramón climbed back in the truck and patted his pocket with a wicked lift of his eyebrows. When Tanya didn’t respond, he said, “What is it?”

She lifted her chin and gestured in the traditional Southwestern method of avoiding the rude point of a finger. “Tonio.”

Ramón caught sight of the pair and sighed. “Ah, hell.” He watched them, pursed his lips, and swore again. “He’s supposed to be at debate club this afternoon.”

“What are you going to do?”

He shook his head. “There’s no law against him taking a girl to get a soda, but I hate to think he’s been lying to me.”

“I don’t think he has. That’s surely Teresa, and she’s been going with Edwin.”

“How do you know so much about this?”

“Tonio talked to me about it.”

Ramón measured her. “And you didn’t say anything?”

“Say what, Ramón? He wanted to talk to a woman about a girl, and I was handy, that’s all.”

With a pensive expression, Ramón watched Tonio and Teresa join hands once more and head for the ice-cream shop on the corner. They were smiling at each other as they went inside. “I don’t like this situation. At all.”

Tanya shook her head. “It’s trouble, all right.”

“Damn.” Ramón started the truck and backed out.

* * *

Ramón felt choked as they drove back to the ranch. His earlier mood of sexy playfulness evaporated; killed by the specter of the possible danger Tonio had put himself in. Or maybe the danger Ramón had put him in—because if he hadn’t had his heart set on running this ranch for troubled boys, Tonio wouldn’t be in this position.

Not like this.

Ramón also felt guilty about the fact that he’d been buying condoms for himself when he was about to give Tonio the standard lecture about sex.

It was true he was an adult, and therefore capable of making decisions that were beyond the capacity of a fourteen-year-old. It was also true that Ramón had not given enough thought to the consequences of a sexual relationship with Tanya. It was his libido that was engaged, his libido turning him into a version of a randy teenager. He’d been completely unable to keep his hands off her today, had thought of nothing but getting her into his bed tonight and making love to her thoroughly and completely.

He’d given no thought to what would come afterward. And when he’d seen Tonio kissing his girlfriend, a vision of himself kissing Tanya in the library flashed before his eyes.

Do as I say, not as I do
.

That had never been the way Ramón did things. He believed in the old-fashioned method of providing an example for boys to emulate, not setting down a list of arbitrary rules. He didn’t drink, not because he had problems with it, but because so many boys did. He didn’t smoke, even though he missed it, because he wanted to be a good role model. When he had carried on his affair with the teacher in town, he’d been very discreet, and careful to handle everything away from the ranch.

But with Tanya, he’d lost control. She had come to his room trustingly to tell him something, and he’d seduced her, knowing she was vulnerable, that she was ripe to be made love to, that she needed it.

Nice justification.

On the far end of the bench seat, Tanya sat with crossed arms, staring with no expression out the window. A sorrow pierced him. There was no possible way to keep such a thing secret at the ranch. The boys would start gossiping about her. They might even make remarks to her face.

And that would hurt her.

In sudden decision, he pulled over, this time on a lonely stretch of naked road. Across a vista of dry prairie grasses and swords of yucca, the mountains were a jagged blue line under a frosting of clouds. He turned off the engine and sat quietly, trying to think of the right way to word his thoughts.

“Tanya,” he began.

She looked at him, her vulnerable deep blue eyes wide in her face, a face that showed the strength of her in ways he doubted she even guessed. The authority of experience lived in the cut of her mouth. The courage that had seen her survival burned in her eyes. Character had painted a face of honor and sensitivity.