Haley really didn’t intend to go to work the next day, but her mother called and asked her to come in for half a day, so that morning found her right back in her old routine. High heels and her best black suit with the red satin button-up shirt under it felt strange on Wednesday morning when Haley dressed for work. She picked up her briefcase holding her laptop and that day’s printed agenda from her assistant, Joyce. She had a meeting with her parents in the conference room first thing that morning, after which there would be a larger meeting that would last until ten. From then until five she was booked solid with one thing and another, then there was that dinner with Joel and her parents that she couldn’t figure a way out of short of crawling up in a casket and crossing her hands over her boobs.
The first person she saw when she walked into the ground floor of the business was Joel holding the door for her. She waltzed through with a nod but he quickly caught up, grabbed her arm, and spun her around to kiss her right on the lips.
“I missed you, darling,” he said.
She wiped the back of her hand across her lips. “We’ll talk later. I’ve got to meet with my folks before the midweek conference.”
“Yes, we will. I’m looking forward to dinner tonight.” He winked.
“Lord, put me back on a damn horse,” she mumbled as she pushed the elevator button.
Her mother crossed the room in long strides and hugged her tightly. “Look at you. I expected a holy mess from the way you talked, but you look wonderful.”
Jenny Levy was five feet ten inches tall without her high heels. Her Cajun blood showed in her jet-black hair, ebony eyes, and the angles of her face. She wore a gorgeous blue sleeveless dress with a short-cropped jacket over it and shoes dyed to match.
“Most of the mess is covered up. See?” Haley pulled back her bangs.
“What in the hell happened? Do you have leprosy? My God, Carl, what did you do to my baby?” Jenny shot daggers at her husband.
Carl wasted no time in setting his coffee down and getting to his daughter where he took a look at her snow-white forehead. “Hat?”
Haley nodded. “My arms are the same. White above my short shirtsleeves and brown as toast from there down.”
Jenny pointed at Carl. “Look what you caused. I told you to send Joel.”
“She needed the experience. Now let’s talk. We’ve decided to trash the reality show after all. Joel has a new and fresh idea about country folks going to the city. Kind of like Crocodile Dundee when he came to New York, only with today’s twist.”
Haley’s blood ran cold through her veins. She looked like a damn redneck. She’d lived through a tornado as well as a stampede, had almost gotten hit by lightning, and could have been bitten by a rattlesnake. She had spent hours and hours on notes for the show. And they were trashing it!
“Get a cup of coffee, darling. I promise your father will never ever do this to you again or I’ll tell Granny to take him to the bayou and leave him there,” Jenny said.
“I don’t want a damn cup of coffee,” she said coldly.
“Now, don’t take that tone with us. It’s like writing a book, honey. You get rejections. The reality show was a great idea, but it was a day late and ten dollars short when it came to the market.”
“When did you make this decision?” Haley asked.
“Joel did the research while you were gone,” Jenny said. “He brought it all to us two weeks ago.”
“And you let me stay out there with the mosquitoes, the chiggers, horse shit, and tornadoes? You didn’t even try to send a rescue squad to ask me if I wanted to come home?”
Her father shrugged. “We weren’t sure where you were.”
“I was on a freakin’ horse’s back going fifteen miles or less a day on the Chisholm Trail, which is marked pretty damned well. You could have found me,” she shouted.
Carl held up a finger and narrowed his eyes. “Don’t raise your voice.”
She spun around and headed out the door.
“Where are you going? The midweek conference starts in five minutes,” Carl said.
“Have it without me. Hell, you can make all kinds of decisions without consulting me. Why in the hell would you need my input in a little thing like a midweek conference? I’m taking the rest of this week and maybe next week off. Dock my pay if I don’t have enough vacation time to cover the damn days.”
“Hey, there’s no need for this,” Jenny said softly.
“Oh, I think there is.” She kept walking.
“Where can I reach you?” Jenny yelled.
“In an emergency—and it had damn well better be an emergency—you can call Granny. I’m going to Louisiana.”
***
Dewar was mucking out a horse stall when his phone vibrated in his hip pocket. He leaned the shovel against the stall door and smiled as he answered it.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
“A damn suit and a damn pair of high heels, both of which I’m going home to change,” Haley said.
“Whoa, darlin’. Who done pissed on your bagel this morning?”
“My parents, and I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to be fit to be around until I quit fuming and I won’t be at the rodeo on Saturday and I won’t be at my apartment. I’m going to Louisiana to spend a whole week with my granny and they can all slip in cow shit and fall right into hell.”
“Whew! What on earth happened, Haley? Did they prearrange a marriage or sell you into slavery?”
“They decided two damn weeks ago to cancel the reality show and they didn’t even have the decency to come find me. And Miz Sadie will be looking for us to film the whorehouse and don’t you dare kiss me again, Joel. I swear I’ll knock the shit right out of you,” she said.
“I’m not Joel. What in the hell is going on there?” Dewar said.
“Well, he was coming at me with a big grin and he already kissed me hello this morning. Joel, you can go to hell!”
“Haley? Are you all right?” Dewar asked.
“I’m fine and dandy and Daddy can adopt Joel’s sorry ass and call him a son. I’m going to Granny’s and we might just gamble the hell out of what’s left of my whole paycheck from the trail drive.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Soon as I go home, pack my suitcase, and get the valet to bring my car around.”
“Drive safe and call me when you stop for lunch?” Dewar said.
“Probably before then, and thanks for not trying to talk me out of it,” she said.
“Hell, honey, I’d leave too. Carl was out a wad of money for that project.”
Haley hailed a taxi and then said, “He’ll write it off as a tax expense. Give me an hour and I’ll call you when I’m not ready to burn down the corporation. I’m in a taxi going two blocks when I could have walked that far even in these ridiculous high heels. Don’t that make a helluva lot of sense.”
“Cool down, darlin’, and don’t drive fast when you do get behind the wheel of your car,” he said.
He stared at the phone for a long time before he put it back in his pocket. Life could turn on a dime and change in the course of a five-minute phone call. He’d been thinking about buying roses and champagne for after the rodeo on Saturday. Now he wouldn’t even get to see her for two weeks.
“Your new girlfriend?” Maddie asked.
She didn’t look old enough to have five grown children, three grandchildren, and three more on the way. She had a few crow’s-feet around her bright blue eyes, but her chestnut hair didn’t sport even one gray strand. She was tall and slim, wore tight jeans and a chambray work shirt out over an aqua-colored undershirt, the same shade as her eyes.
“It was Haley. She won’t be coming to the rodeo. She’s going to Louisiana to visit her grandmother,” Dewar said.
“Likely story,” Maddie grumbled.
“It’s the truth. She’s mad at her folks. After all the money and time spent, they decided there would be no reality show and she really worked very hard on that trip thinking up ideas for the show. I’d be pissed too, Momma,” Dewar said.
“Rich city people. No understanding the way they think. You going to exercise Glorious Danny Boy this morning?”
“Soon as I get this stall cleaned out, we’ve got a date. He says he missed me pretty bad,” Dewar said.
“Not as much as your family did.” Maddie led a saddled horse out of the barn and mounted up for a ride.
***
Haley whipped around a few loops and caught I-30 west toward Shreveport, missing all the morning traffic and getting through town before the lunch crowd found their way onto the streets. When she got there, she’d go south on 49 straight into Jeanerette and on out to the sugar plantation where Granny ruled the roost.
She slapped the steering wheel when her phone rang and the ID said it was Joel.
“What in the hell do you want?” she said.
“If I was your father I’d fire you,” he said.
“Well, you aren’t, and frankly I don’t care if he does.”
“He and your mother have worked their whole lives to…”
She did a head wiggle. “Don’t you start that shit with me. They’ve worked their whole lives because they wanted to. Why didn’t you come after me when they ditched the reality show idea?”
“I’m the one who said you should stay out there and learn to appreciate how good you have it here.” He laughed.
It all came tumbling down on her in the confines of a small car and made her mad all over again. He had called the shots and her parents had let him. She hung up on him without another word, steam practically shooting out her ears and from the top of her red hair.
The phone rang again and she pushed the speakerphone button. If they wanted a war she could deliver it complete with weapons of mass destruction. She was a tough woman. Hell’s bells, she’d just ridden a horse for a month. They couldn’t win against her.
“Haley Belle McKay Levy, you turn that car around and come back to work. If you weren’t my daughter, I’d have fired you on the spot. But if you are here by the time we go to dinner, I won’t.” Jenny’s tone left no wiggle room.
“I’m just a stupid employee that you left out in the wilds for two weeks past when you knew you weren’t going to run the show, so fire my ass. I don’t care. I can find a job.”
“Not without my recommendation,” Jenny said sternly.
“Is Daddy standing right beside you?”
“Yes, he’s here and so is Joel. You are on speakerphone. What in the devil has gotten into you?”
If she told them that Dewar had gotten into her by the river, under a shade tree, in a hotel room, hell, even in an outhouse, they’d all three drop dead on the spot.
“I’ll decide in the next ten days if I’m going to look for another job or work for you,” she said.
“Young lady, you’ve got five hours, not ten days. If you aren’t at dinner tonight, you are fired,” Carl said. “You won’t last a week in the real world.”
“I just lasted a month in a world a lot more real than anything you can throw at me.” She poked the button on the phone and kept driving.
When it rang again she looked before she answered.
“I’m still mad,” she said.
Dewar chuckled in his throaty drawl.
She smiled and part of the anger floated away from her heart. “I think I just got fired.”
“You what?” he stammered.
“My dad said that if I wasn’t at the dinner tonight with him and Momma and Joel that I was fired. I’m not going, so I think I just got fired. Maybe Granny will put me to work at the sugar plantation,” she said.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Hey, I just helped herd cattle through three states. I can bring in a sugar crop if I need to,” she said defensively.
“You can do anything, honey.”
“So you think I could last a week in the real world?” she asked.
He chuckled again. “You just lasted four times that long. Don’t argue with success. What do you really, really want to do, Haley? What’s been your secret dream that you never shared with anyone else?”
“Right now I want to own my own cable television company and do the reality show myself. I want you to be the trail boss and I’ll go along and help produce it and we’ll live under the stars just like we did on the trial run. But that’s not a possibility so I’m going to Granny’s and they can all go to hell. What are you doing right now? Tell me so I’ll quit thinking about how mad I am.”
“I’ve got to take Glorious Danny Boy back to the stable and brush him down. Want a job exercising horses? We pay minimum and you could have room and board at my house,” he said.
“Hey, cowboy, don’t offer something you can’t deliver. I might take you up on that offer if Daddy is serious,” she said.
“Talk to you later,” Dewar said.
The next call was from her assistant at the corporation.
“Did you really quit?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. I got fired, or at least that’s the threat if I don’t go to dinner with Momma, Daddy, and Joel.”
Joyce snorted. “Gossip has it that Joel had a girlfriend who just dropped him and he can’t bear being rejected twice so he’s put out the word that he dropped her because he’s still in love with you. Joel is just a plain old gold-digging son of a bitch. Jenny won’t let your dad fire you. Come on back home and let’s get some work done.”
Haley shook her head. “Ain’t happenin’.”
“What’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“Whoever you’ve fallen in love with.”
“I’m not in love.”
“You might fool some folks, Haley Belle, but not me. If you want to talk or learn the gossip, give me a call. And they aren’t going to fire you. Don’t worry about that. If they do, I’ll shoot Joel for you,” Joyce said.
She was through Shreveport and headed south before her phone rang again. She’d cooled down but still didn’t want to talk to Joel, so she let it ring three times and checked the caller ID before she answered.
“Yes, Mother.”
“Are you on your way back?”
“Who’s in the room with you?”
“I’m alone and it’s not on speaker.”
“No, I’m still going to Granny’s.”
“I called her. She knows you’ll be there in time for dinner this evening,” Jenny said.
“And?”
A long pregnant pause followed, but Haley didn’t say anything.
“She said that we did you wrong and you had a right to be mad at us. I didn’t want your father to send you on that trip. Then I wasn’t in agreement with him and Joel when they decided to let you finish the trip. We’ve been arguing all day.”