Sweet Return (3 page)

“Death” and “crippled” were the next words that floated into Joanna’s mind, but the doctor offset her thoughts with a positive prognosis.

Still, a single tear leaked from a corner of Clova’s eye and a shard of anger pierced Joanna. Lane Cherry, at times, had been the most irresponsible twenty-nine-year-old man she could think of, with little apparent consideration for how his behavior affected those around him. Because he was younger than her own thirty-five years, Joanna had known him only since he had become an adult. His diligent pursuit of wine, women and song was a common topic of conversation in Joanna’s Salon & Supplies, the Hatlow beauty salon/beauty supply/janitorial supply store she owned.

Tonight Lane had broken more than bones; he had broken his mother’s heart. Again.

Soon she and Clova were on the road back to Hatlow. They rode in silence for the most part. Clova showed little emotion and Joanna wanted to say nothing to make her feel worse.

They arrived just as the world turned from darkness to predawn’s translucence. Joanna dropped Clova off with a brief good-bye and a promise to see her later.

The Parker ranch was located ten miles south of town, but Joanna lived inside the city limits. By the time she reached her own cozy cottage, she had been up three hours short of twenty-four. Her exhausted body felt as if it had just completed a marathon run.

In her garage, while she waited for the door to rumble to a close, she keyed in the number of the beauty salon and left a voice mail message for her mom to pick up when she opened. It was too early to call Mom at home.

Joanna entered the house through the utility room door but didn’t turn on a light. On her way to her bedroom, she trudged through the kitchen, then the dining room, skirting furniture made colorless by dawn’s filmy light. She plopped her purse on the dining table as she passed it.

With her last ounce of energy she changed into a pair of knit shorts and a holey T-shirt, then climbed into bed, thinking all the while that her life was killing her. Thirty-five was too damned old for this staying-up-all-night shit.

The phone’s warble jarred her awake. She popped up on the edge of the mattress and grabbed the receiver, her brain cells and eyesight only half functioning. She grunted a greeting.

“Hey, you, rise and shine.” Shari Huddleston, Joanna’s best friend. Shari, her husband, Jay, and Joanna had started kindergarten together. Brothers and sisters couldn’t know one another any better.

Joanna shoved a hank of hair off her face and managed a harrumph. “What time is it?”

“High noon. Where were you last night? We waited for you.”

A frown creased Joanna’s brow. She just now remembered she had told Shari she might drop in at Sylvia’s Café after work and join her, Jay and Owen Luck for supper. “Crap, Shari, I forgot all about it.”

Not entirely a true statement, but Joanna considered it a tactful fib rather than a lie. Owen Luck was a newly divorced accountant who looked after Shari and Jay’s business bookkeeping and their taxes. Both he and his ex-wife were long-standing customers in Joanna’s Salon & Supplies. And Hatlow was the gossip capital of Texas. Even if Joanna found Owen personally appealing, which she didn’t, going out with him wasn’t worth losing a customer. She had told them she would meet them in the first place only because Shari had nagged her into it.

“I told Owen you probably got tied up,” Shari said. “We tried to call you on your cell, but all we got was voice mail.”

Glancing down at her fingers, Joanna toyed with a hangnail, reluctant to reveal last night’s whereabouts and fuel a gossip bomb that had probably already exploded. “I didn’t have my cell with me. Was Owen mad?”

“A little. He ate and left. Said he was going over to the bars at the state line.”

Joanna’s mouth flatlined, but she wasn’t surprised. Many Hatlow citizens, including Joanna herself, sometimes sought to interrupt the sameness of small-town life in the bars and nightclubs at the New Mexico state line. Not even a beer could be bought legally in Wacker County.

Shari chortled. “He said he wanted to go where he could find a woman who was more interested in him than in a bunch of damn chickens.”

That remark brought a scowl to Joanna’s mouth. Everyone in Hatlow, including all of her friends, thought her poultry-and-egg venture was a dive off the deep end. And lately, she had to admit, she had entertained similar thoughts herself. “It’s just as well. One thing I do not need is a newly divorced guy crying on my shoulder about his ex-wife and three kids. Besides, Shari, he probably spends all his money on child support.”

“Yeah, yeah. At least he can afford the price of supper. So where were you?” Joanna recognized the determination in her friend’s voice.

“I hate to tell you. But you’ve probably already heard about Lane Cherry’s wreck. I drove Clova to the hospital in Lubbock.”

“My God, Joanna. That must’ve taken all night. I did hear something about him having a wreck. How bad was he hurt?”

Joanna didn’t even ask how Shari had heard. Gossip in Hatlow seemed to move through the ether from out of nowhere. “Pretty bad. Broken bones. Internal injuries. He’s out of commission for a good long while.”

“Uh-oh. That’ll upset Megan Richardson. She’s sleeping with him, you know. She’s been telling everybody in town what a hot lay he is.” Shari giggled. “She says he’s hung like a bull. I hope, for her sake, that part of him wasn’t damaged.”

Joanna’s shoulders sagged as she stared at a cheap framed print of a wolf face on her wall. When it came to relationships between men and women, Shari’s first thought was always of sex. Probably why she had given birth to four kids. As a girl growing up, Joanna’s source of sex education might have been her big sister, but as an adult, it had been and continued to be Shari Huddleston. “Shari, forgodsakes. He could have died. He could still die. He’s in ICU.”

“I’m just repeating what Megan said.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about his bedroom prowess, but if that’s all Megan’s interested in, she might have to go elsewhere. If Lane makes it through this, I imagine he might not be
laying
for the rest of the year.”

The digital clock on Joanna’s nightstand whirred and clicked past one o’clock. “And speaking of laying, I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to get out to Clova’s and check on my hens and gather my eggs.”

She pictured Shari rolling her eyes.

“Did he run into another car or what?” Shari asked, persistent in her quest to learn more details.

“Rolled his pickup. Hit a power pole. Or vice versa.”

“Where at?”

“On the Lovington highway, just this side of the state line.”

“Good God. How weird is that? There aren’t that many power poles along that highway.”

“I know. I guess one just happened to be standing in the right place.”

“I’ll bet he was partying at those joints at the state line. It’s a wonder he didn’t run into Owen Luck. Was he drunk?”

Joanna almost said,
Hell, yes, he was drunk,
but then she remembered that Shari worked for the insurance agency that probably carried Lane’s auto insurance policy, if he had one. She suddenly didn’t want to be disseminating information to her. “I don’t know,” she lied. “He was already in surgery when Clova and I got there.”

“I hope Clova’s okay. That boy’s given her a lot of grief.”

“He’s not a boy. And that’s the disgusting part. But, yeah, Clova’s okay. She’s used to getting bad news about Lane.”

“Bless her heart. Now would be a good time for Dalton to come home and help her. It’s a crying shame to have two grown sons and neither one of them does a damn thing for her. If my boys grow up to treat me like that, I’ll just kill ’em.”

“Shari, I’ve got to get going,” Joanna said.

“Wait a minute. Do you want Jay to fix up another date with Owen?”

To Joanna’s annoyance, Shari and Jay constantly searched for “a man for Joanna.” “No, Shari. I’m not interested.”

“Joanna, listen to yourself. I swear to God, you’re gonna die an old maid.”

“Shari. I’ve got to go.”

After she hung up, Joanna called the beauty salon and told her mom she had returned to the land of the living and that she would be in as soon as she tended the hens.

“You don’t have to go out there,” Mom said. “I got your message ’bout you bein’ up all night. Alicia come in and I sent her out. She didn’t get all the eggs, but she filled up the feeders and changed the drinkin’ water.”

Thank God.
Alicia Garza was Joanna’s conscientious seventeen-year-old employee who helped her do almost everything. She worked for Joanna’s Salon & Supplies part-time and was one of the few people who didn’t make fun of Joanna. She was so fascinated by the egg business and the hens, Joanna let her choose names for the new chicks. She didn’t have to worry about the teenager doing a poor job.

Joanna showered and shampooed, then dried her hair and dressed in a T-shirt, a pair of Cruel Girl jeans and boots, her attire for every occasion these days. A few dresses hung in her closet, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had worn one. She brushed on a scant layer of makeup, then spritzed herself with something that smelled like roses. Since she sold cosmetics and fragrances at the beauty supply store, she tried to always wear her products. The mirrored oval tray that sat on her bathroom counter held so many bottles of various colognes and perfumes, she didn’t even concern herself with the brand or name. She just picked one and sprayed it.

She moved on into the kitchen. The sight of her purse on the dining table brought thoughts of Clova’s oldest son back to her. At the hospital, while she still remembered his phone number, she had gone into the ladies’ room and written it on a grocery store receipt she found in her purse. She chewed on her lower lip, wishing Clova hadn’t asked her not to call Dalton. The compulsion to do it anyway was almost overwhelming. The woman needed help from somewhere.

You’re butting in,
her sister would tell her. But was Lanita going to come to Hatlow, go out to the Parker ranch and help Clova? No.

Stickin’ your nose in other people’s business gets you in a lotta trouble
. Her mom had said those words to her just last week. Was Mom going out to the Parker ranch to help Clova? No.

Still undecided, Joanna veered her thoughts to something she
could
decide on: food. She peered into the refrigerator and saw poor pickings—sliced ham with an expired date on the package, sliced processed cheese and stale bread. No telling how long the bread had been there, but it appeared to be free of mold. She smoothed mayonnaise on a slice, added a squirt of mustard and folded it over some ham and cheese.
It’s fine,
she told herself as she filled a glass with ice cubes and Diet Pepsi.

She carried her lunch to the dining table. The purse that held the California phone number sat there staring back at her like a dare. What would she say to a son who hadn’t returned to visit his mother more than a dozen times in twenty years? Without sounding like a hysterical lunatic, how could she convey to him the seriousness of his brother’s condition and the gravity of his mother’s dilemma?

Through all of her dithering over the phone call, Clova’s state of mind, Lane’s condition and a million other niggling little worries, the bottom line kept pushing its way toward the forefront of her thoughts. Joanna hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, even to herself, because she hadn’t wanted to seem callous. But she couldn’t forget that her two hundred hens lived at the Parker ranch and she had mortgaged the very roof over her head to pay for her free-range egg business. Didn’t that fact alone make her interest in what happened to the Parker ranch extend beyond caring about Clova and Lane as friends?

She easily convinced herself that it did. On a note of determination, she carried the phone and the yellow legal pad she kept beside it back to the table. While she ate, she made a few notes—“talking points,” the sophisticated businesspeople called them.

Clova had told her Dalton traveled a lot. Since Joanna wasn’t sure he would even be at home, she decided to abandon talking points and wrote out the voice mail message she would read if necessary.

She finished her sandwich, then dug the receipt from her purse and smoothed out the wrinkles. Maybe Clova would never know she had called him. The decision to butt in made, she summoned her nerve and keyed in the California number. Sure enough, she got voice mail. She left her rehearsed message and her business number, but the machine cut her off before she could leave her complete home number.

Dalton Parker had no sooner killed his truck engine in his garage and scooted out when Candace Carlisle handed him a note.
Uh-oh.
She never came into the garage except to get into her car.

“A woman from Texas left a personal message on voice mail,” Candace said.

A pulse jumped in Dalton’s stomach. These days he knew no one in Texas but his family. “Shit,” he mumbled under his breath. “Okay, thanks.”

He stepped back to his truck bed and lifted out a heavy cardboard box filled with cans of paint and supplies he had just bought at Home Depot. He intended to clean and repaint his office and his studio. He carried the box over and thunked it onto the wooden workbench he had built on one side of the garage.

“Who is she, Dalton?”

He turned and looked closer at Candace’s face, saw a shimmer of tears in her blue eyes and made a mental groan. “I don’t know. She must be who she says she is. A friend of my mother’s.”

Candace turned sharply and left the garage, her high-heeled shoes clacking out anger in quick little steps. As Dalton watched her go, he sighed. He still couldn’t sort out exactly how she came to be living in his house, but he knew himself well enough to know that in a weak moment he must have invited her. He loved sex. He didn’t always love women, but they controlled the thing that he loved. Ergo, Candace Carlisle had moved in.

Inside the house, he went to his office, made dim by a huge bush outside the window, and played back his voice mail messages—his agent in New York, his editor, his insurance agent. Finally he reached one from a voice he had never heard before: