Sweet Return (2 page)

True enough,
Joanna thought. Tonight’s wreck wasn’t Lane Cherry’s first or even his second. Whatever his injuries were, they weren’t his first, either. From his vehicular mishaps to his years of bronc and bull riding in rodeos, he boasted a host of trophy scars and pinned bones.

Clova said nothing else and Joanna was glad. At eighty miles an hour, she had to concentrate on not wrecking her own pickup.

At last they reached the outskirts of Lubbock. She well knew the location of Lubbock Memorial. Every Hatlow citizen who suffered serious injury or illness sooner or later found him-or herself at the regional medical facility. She made her way there over empty streets. With the exception of a few college kids, Lubbock citizens weren’t out cruising at this hour.

Once they were in front of the reception desk inside the hospital’s expansive modern entry, an aide hustled them to the basement, into a chilled, poorly lit waiting room outside the surgery suite. A nurse reported that Lane had been in surgery an hour and assured them someone would speak to them soon.

Joanna and Clova were the only people present in the stark waiting room. Clova wilted onto the edge of the seat of a beige armchair, the worry in her brown eyes almost palpable. She didn’t look well in general. Her skin had a pallor and dark crescents showed under her eyes. She had teetered on the verge of breaking down for most of the trip from Hatlow.

“Looks like we could be here a while,” Joanna said. “There must be a coffee machine or something around here somewhere. I’ll get you—”

“Thanks, hon, but I don’t need nothin’.” Clova broke into a hard, raspy cough. It had been with her for weeks. It sounded like a smoker’s cough, but Clova didn’t smoke and never had, as far as Joanna knew. Recovered, Clova inhaled a great breath and let it out, her eyes vacant and seemingly focused on nothing. Joanna couldn’t guess what she might be thinking.

She sank into an armchair beside her friend, finally acknowledging the chill in the large room. The decor—beige tile floor, square furniture, abstract paintings of multicolored squares hanging on the walls—did nothing to add warmth to what felt like a subzero temperature. As she scanned their surroundings, she thought of how the sharp edges and hard, cold surfaces were so much like Clova Parker Cherry’s life.

Joanna began to shiver. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. In such a hurry when she threw on her clothes and left her house, she hadn’t thought of a jacket or a sweater. She picked up her purse and stood up. “I’m freezing. I’m going to find something hot to drink.”

Still wired from driving eighty to ninety miles an hour most of the trip from Hatlow, she had to move around. She hung her purse on her shoulder and walked out of the waiting room into a vacant hallway. A distance up the tiled corridor, she saw a pink neon sign pointing to a snack bar. There she found two pots of coffee simmering on hot plates, but no one manning the cash register. On the Formica pay-out counter sat a cardboard box with a slot in the top and a crude, hand-printed sign requesting the customers use the honor system.

She dug a couple of singles from her purse and stuffed them into the slotted box. She poured coffee into two Styrofoam cups, her weary mind wandering to why she had just raced up a lonely highway in the middle of the night after working a fifteen-hour day. Oh, she knew the answer well enough. Either her mother or her sister, or both, reminded her daily of her penchant for worrying about and taking on someone else’s problems at the expense of solving her own. Fretting over a friend’s troubles was one of her great weaknesses. With such a reputation to live up to, how could she not be doing exactly what she was doing now?

She carried the two cups to a waist-high counter and sprinkled a packet of Sweet’N Low and poured two packets of artificial cream into one. She didn’t really like coffee but could tolerate it if she changed the flavor enough. She desired it tonight because it was hot and she was still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.

As she stirred the coffee, she began to worry about whether Lane Cherry would come out of this alive or if he might be unable to work for some long period of time, and how either of those outcomes would impact the old Parker ranch. Clova had been struggling to hang on to it ever since Joanna had known her. Lane was more or less the manager. When he was sober and at home, that is.

As she returned to the waiting room with the two cups of coffee, Joanna remembered Clova’s other son, who lived in California. His name was Dalton and he was roughly the same age as Joanna’s older sister. In high school, Lanita had dated him once or twice. Joanna knew he was a photographer whose work had been published in big, expensive-looking books. She had seen them stacked on the coffee table and the end tables in Clova’s living room. But that was the extent of her knowledge about him. As many times as she had visited Clova’s home, she had thumbed through those books only rarely.

She handed Clova the cup of hot black coffee. “I brought you some just in case you change your mind.”

Clova gave her a wan smile and took the cup. “Thanks, hon.”

Joanna seated herself beside the older woman again, resting her elbows on the chair arms and looking at her across her shoulder. “I was just thinking. Lane could be laid up a while. Why don’t you call Dalton and tell him you need help. Maybe he could come to the ranch and stay a few days. Or even a few weeks.”

Clova drew herself ever deeper into her coat, sniffed and shook her head. “No use talkin’ ’bout Dalton. Or tryin’ to talk
to
him. He ain’t never home. He don’t care nothin’ ’bout us, anyway, Joanna. And I don’t blame him. Back when it mattered, we didn’t act like we cared much about him.”

Joanna didn’t know what she meant by that. Maybe it had something to do with what everyone in Hatlow said about Dalton being mistreated by his stepfather and, indirectly, by his mother. Hatlow was a place where few “secrets” were secret. She refused to believe Clova had ever mistreated anyone, especially one of her children. Later she might ask her about it, but not tonight.

“I know you need to get your cattle to the sale. I think Harvey McAdoo’s kid will be home another couple of weeks before he goes back to school. He can probably help you out. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind earning a little extra money.”

“Lord God, Joanna, I ain’t sure I could pay him. Lane ain’t got any hospital insurance, you know. No telling what this bill’s gonna cost.” She closed her eyes and rubbed a furrowed brow with her fingertips.

At the hopelessness of the woman’s situation, Joanna released a sigh and stared at the tan liquid in her own cup. Her head had begun to ache. Her eyes felt hot and gritty, as if she had spent the day in a sandstorm. At this moment, problem solving didn’t rate high on her list of priorities. She was worn out.

And dammit, she was freezing to the point of shivering. Didn’t anyone know how to turn off the air-conditioning in this place? Cold-enough-to-freeze-fire might be fine in the daytime when the outside temperature climbed to a hundred, but at two a.m., after it had dropped forty degrees, it was cold. She set her coffee on the table beside her chair and rubbed her palms up and down her arms for warmth.

Despite knowing she couldn’t add one more chore to her own to-do list, she said, “I can help you with some chores when I come out to tend the hens and gather the eggs.”

Somehow she would find the time.

Before more could be said, a woman dressed in blue scrubs bustled in and quickstepped to a desk at the end of the room. A highway patrolman from Texas’s Department of Public Safety followed her and waited while she opened drawers, brought out papers and attached them to a clipboard. The two talked in low tones. Joanna strained her ears but could make out only snippets of their conversation. The words that came to her in capital letters were “blood alcohol test.”
Oh, hell.

Joanna had feared Lane was drunk. In recent months, he had spent a lot of his time in that state. She glanced at Clova, who had to have heard the same words but appeared to be unaffected.

Joanna had seen her close her mind to a problem related to Lane before. Clova Cherry was a tough, strong woman in many ways. Somehow, in the face of punishing obstacles and monumental odds stacked against her, she had held together the cattle ranch she inherited from her family. But Joanna had been acquainted with her long enough to know she wasn’t strong emotionally.

They had been friends ever since Joanna returned to Hatlow thirteen years ago to work as a hairdresser and nail tech. Clova was one of the first Hatlow citizens to let Joanna do her hair. Brave on her part, Joanna always thought. Clova’s willingness to let a struggling twenty-two-year-old earn twenty dollars for cutting and perming her hair had forged an unwavering loyalty in Joanna.

Back then, Clova’s hair had been coal black and hung straight as a string, genetic evidence of her Comanche ancestry. Her daddy had claimed to be related to Quanah Parker, so Clova claimed that, too. Tonight, strands of black and gray hair had come loose from the bun on the back of her head and she looked to be held together by a skeleton as fragile as toothpicks. She was somewhere around fifty-five years old, younger than Joanna’s mother, but she looked ten years older. Weathered by winter’s blue northers, summer’s blazing sun and the hot, dry wind that showed no mercy in its ceaseless sweep of the high plains, Texas Panhandle ranchwomen often looked older than their years.

Since Clova didn’t show a reaction to what the nurse and the DPS trooper had said, Joanna didn’t mention it. Conversation only added to her fatigue. She leaned back in the chair, propped her neck on its cold steel back and closed her eyes, her thoughts settling on Dalton Parker.

Clova might not want to talk about him, but other people in Hatlow did. In a West Texas town of seven thousand, he was one of the few who had ever climbed to even token celebrity. Joanna hadn’t heard much about him of late, but she remembered that in high school he had been a hunky football player. Quarterback, she recalled. Everyone said he was smart. He had a high IQ, had been valedictorian of his class. Most of the girls in school had a crush on him, she among them. Strictly from a distance, though, in her case, because in truth, she had known him only by sight.

Then it dawned on her that with him being in the same grade as Lanita, he must be thirty-eight or so. She opened her eyes and looked at Clova again.

“Dalton’s what, nearly forty?”

“He turned thirty-seven back in April.”

Hearing the number spoken reminded Joanna that Clova had been a teenager when her oldest son was born. Joanna knew she hadn’t finished high school, and was sure that when Clova was a teenager, unmarried pregnant girls didn’t stay in school. “When’s the last time you called him?”

Clova shook her head. “I don’t call him. I used to, but I quit. He’s always gone somewhere.”

“Then when’s the last time he called you?”

“He don’t call me, neither. We don’t talk much anymore.”

“Where’s he living now?”

“Los Angeles, far as I know.”

Joanna felt renewed compassion at the gap that existed between Clova and her son, but feeling sorry didn’t solve the problem at hand, which was the operation of a working cattle ranch with no man around to do a man’s work.

Joanna Faye Walsh never let trouble fester. At some point in her life, without consciously knowing it, she formed the notion that it was better to face a crisis head-on and do something about it, even if what you did was wrong. She could thank her mom for that attitude. Alvadean Walsh could not—and had never been able to—deal with so much as a simple problem without turning it into a calamity. Not that Joanna didn’t love her mother, but Mom, plain and simple, was a dingbat.

In self-defense, as Joanna had grown up, she had morphed into a person who “fixed things.” That trait had seen her through a chaotic childhood. That same trait contributed to the hectic disorder that sometimes existed in her present life. Every day, she fought the compulsion to insert herself into other people’s business in some circumstance or other.

“Do you still have Dalton’s number?” she asked Clova.

“I got an old number. I don’t know if it’s any good now.”

“Look, give it to me and I’ll call him for you. It might be better for a stranger to call him anyway.”

Without a word, Clova picked up a stained tooled leather purse from the floor and pawed through it. She came up with a worn address book, the kind you get for free at Christmas from some insurance company that wants your business. It was badly frayed and the loose pages were held together by a red rubber band. With work-worn fingers, Clova slowly removed the binding, found a ragged page and handed it over. “Just take the whole page,” she said. “I don’t need it anyway.”

Joanna looked down at it and saw one phone number. No name. Just a faded number. “I left my cell at home on the charger, but there must be a pay phone around here somewhere. I can call him collect. It’s two hours earlier in California.”

“Wait, Joanna. Give me back that number. On second thought, I don’t want you callin’ him.”

“Why not?”

Clova looked down at her hands, which were clenched into a tight knot. “I don’t want him thinkin’ I call him up only when I got problems.”

But he’s your son.
Joanna looked at the number again, doing her best to commit it to memory. “Okay. But I think you should call him.” She handed the page back to Clova, who returned it to the tattered address book.

Joanna ran the seven digits through her mind again, knowing Clova wouldn’t call him. If Joanna ever saw home again, she vowed, she just might make that call anyway. If she didn’t, who would come to Clova’s rescue?

Chapter 2

After Lane had been brought out of surgery, barely alive and bandaged and mummified by a plaster cast, a stubble-jawed surgeon met for a few minutes with Clova. Joanna stood in the background and kept her silence, but her weary mind translated the medical jargon into real words she understood: busted spleen, broken ribs, broken collarbone, shattered left leg. Lane was more hurt than either she or his mother had imagined.