Sweet Return (6 page)

Thank God for that,
he thought.

“I nearly went crazy while you were gone,” she said. “You know how horny I get.”

He chuckled again. “Baby, you’re the horniest woman I’ve ever known.”

He turned on his side, braced his elbow on the mattress and leaned his head on his hand. The profile of her breasts and nipples in silhouette in the moonlight was almost as interesting as seeing her nakedness in the light. He still didn’t understand what a woman who looked like her saw in him. Hell, he was getting old. He couldn’t fuck all night like he used to. His black hair was peppered with gray. His body bore scars. He now wore glasses for close work, and he was crankier than a sleep-deprived bear.

He trailed a finger from her throat down the middle of her silky body. She arched her back, covered his hand with hers and placed it between her opened thighs. “I know you thought about this while you were gone,” she said huskily.

“Hmm,” he said, slipping two fingers into her. Jesus, she was wet and ready again. He took her nipple into his mouth. Then he remembered that she didn’t respond well to breast stimulation. She’d had so much plastic surgery, some of the feeling was missing. For some reason, on this particular night, that annoyed him. He let go and flopped over to his back.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he answered.

She turned to him and pressed her breasts against him. “You could have me for good, you know.”

Her hand slid down his belly and her nimble fingers began to stroke his soft dick. At the same time she dragged her tongue over his nipples.

Now it was he who wasn’t responding, which was both puzzling and a little frightening because he’d had no plastic surgery. “Don’t, baby.” He moved her hand, cupped the back of her head and brought it to his shoulder. “I think I’m out of juice. Let’s just go to sleep.”

Seconds later, he heard her sniffle. He suppressed a sigh, fearing that if he released it and she heard, she would interpret it as a desire to “talk about it.” He stroked her hair. “C’mon baby. There’s no need to cry now. Let’s just go to sleep.”

He probably should feel a pang of conscience, he told himself, but he couldn’t help it because the emotion she wanted from him wasn’t there. He hadn’t been able to muster an enduring emotional attachment to any female in a long time.

Another part of him, the part that felt used by Candace, stepped up and asked why he should feel guilty. Hell, she had made out okay. When he met her, she was on the verge of being evicted from a thirties-vintage dump in Venice Beach, working part-time in a Starbucks and surviving on tuna fish and crackers. Now she enjoyed rent-free living in a pretty damn nice place, free food and use of his truck and was required to do zip in return for any of it. He even gave her spending money. She earned a little working at the coffee shop near his house, but he never questioned her about the money she earned. He assumed she spent it on herself.

“I thought you’d, you know, miss me…while you were gone,” she said, her nose stuffy from crying. “I thought…when you got back…we’d, you know, ma-make things…per-permanent.”

Another mental sigh. He had never promised her anything, nor asked her to make promises to him. He had learned his lesson about making pledges to women. He had done it once, before God and state. When it ended a few years later, all he had left was less than half of some expensive photography equipment, a mortgaged house badly in need of remodeling and the shirt on his back. Later, after he learned his ex had put his photo equipment up for sale on eBay, he had bid on and rebought what he couldn’t afford to replace new. “I’ve never said that, Candy.”

“But you di-didn’t say you—you wouldn’t. I wa-want to be your wife, Dalton.”

“Candy, please. I’ve already said I’m not interested in getting—”

“You know what you are, Dalton? I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a self-centered son of a bitch.” She flounced out of bed and left the room.

And at that moment, he knew his next destination. He
had
to go to Texas.

Chapter 4

Sunday. A day to work with the hens and do maintenance in the chicken yard. As always, when this was Joanna’s purpose, she rose early, donned ragged jeans and old boots and a T-shirt and covered her hair with a ball cap. Through her morning ablution, she drank three cups of coffee heavily laced with cream and Sweet’N Low. She followed up with a breakfast consisting of a high-protein energy bar and a Diet Pepsi, which she consumed as she walked to her pickup.

Most of Hatlow’s citizens dressed in their better clothes and went to Sunday school and church. They sang and rejoiced over their blessings, prayed for their families, friends and neighbors, and prayed for the country, and, no matter what else might be happening, they never failed to pray for rain. They followed church with a delicious Sunday dinner.

But not Joanna. True, she had gone to Sunday school and church as a child, and still did on occasion. But when her grandparents passed on, Sunday dinner went with them. Delicious home-cooked meals had never existed in Alvadean Walsh’s household. Joanna’s mother could barely boil water and, as far as anyone knew, had never been interested in learning to do more.

Sunday was also a day of rest for many in Hatlow. That luxury didn’t exist for Joanna, either. She had made the ten-mile trip to the Parker ranch almost every morning just after sunrise, including Sundays, for two and a half years now. Sometimes she could count on Alicia for some relief in the evenings, but at the crack of dawn, not even the loyal Alicia volunteered to drive out to the Parker ranch, tend the hens and gather the eggs. She did it if Joanna asked, but reluctantly.

Joanna had heard the old adage all of her life about the owner of a dairy herd being tied down. Well, she could give testimony from experience that a dairy herd couldn’t possibly be any more confining than a flock of egg-laying hens. Nor could a dairy herd be as sensitive. If something upset the hens—and it could be something as simple as a little noise out of the ordinary—they molted. If they got mad at one of their own for some chicken reason, they might peck her to death. If their food and water didn’t suit them or if they became traumatized by something, they refused to lay eggs.

Joanna battled bobcats, feral cats, raccoons, weasels and coyotes, and the damn snakes, which could eat a dozen eggs faster than she could chase them off. But worst of all were the hawks. The ever-loving, relentless, ruthless, bastard hawks that liked nothing better than a fat hen for lunch. She had read about all of that before plunging with both feet into a business that provided ideal food for predators, but reality hadn’t set in until it touched her.

Beyond those everyday hazards were the bizarre ones—last spring, for instance, when fire ants attacked and murdered a whole batch of baby chicks. More recently, she had even heard that marauding feral hogs might be moving into West Texas. Feral hogs? She had never seen a feral hog.

Listening to the radio, she drove slowly with the windows down, taking in the cool, pleasant temperature and the clear blue sky that always followed a storm. Last night’s expected tempest had passed through as a lamb rather than a lion, but it had sprinkled Wacker County’s parched earth with moisture and blown away the heat temporarily. The smells of the earth rejuvenated by rain filled the cab of her truck. Even the ever-present west wind seemed to have taken a respite.

On either side of the highway, ripening cotton bolls stood in neatly plowed rows of brown earth that marched straight as a ruler’s edge until they disappeared into the distant horizon. Occasionally she passed working pump jacks and she thought of the little surge of new activity in the oil business. Amazing what doubling the price of oil per barrel could do to lift spirits and hope. In West Texas, the price for a barrel of oil was far more important than the cost of a gallon of gasoline.

Soon the windmill in her chicken yard came into view. A few miles later, she came to the beginning of the Parker ranch and the fenced pastures holding grazing cattle with their freeze-dried Lazy P brands. By Texas standards, at roughly seventeen sections, the Lazy P wasn’t a big ranch. It wasn’t even the biggest ranch in Wacker County. But eleven thousand acres was still a heck of a lot of land to someone who had never owned more than a house on a city lot. Joanna wasn’t a jealous-hearted person, but she sometimes wondered how it would feel to own acres and acres of land.

On Sundays Joanna did chores such as making sure the feeders and waterers worked properly, and repairing the fence, roosts and nests. Since becoming an egg farmer, she had become adept with a hammer and saw and tools in general. She couldn’t complain about that. Who knew when those skills would come in handy somewhere besides the chicken yard? Since her dad’s passing, she hadn’t always been able to find some man to do those kinds of chores.

Often, when she arrived at the Parker ranch on Sunday mornings, she found Clova, who was a great cook, starting a big Sunday dinner. Much of the time Clova was the only one around to eat it, but the habit was so ingrained in her from years of cooking for ranch hands that she continued to do it. Joanna was often the beneficiary of the tradition and of Clova’s hospitality, and she looked forward to a delicious meal.

Joanna cooked poorly. Since her mother had never spent much time in the kitchen, Joanna and her sister hadn’t learned to be cooks in their youth like most young rural women. Thus, Joanna particularly enjoyed the aromas and ambience of Clova’s country kitchen. They represented a hominess missing from her life since the passing of her grandparents years back.

This morning, she caught Clova just leaving for the hospital in Lubbock. She was dressed in black Rockies and her new black lace-up Ropers. She had on a red long-sleeve snap-button shirt and heavy turquoise bracelets on each arm. Her long thick hair was held at the crown with a turquoise-inlaid barrette. She looked prettier than Joanna had seen her look in a long time.

After a good-bye, Joanna pulled on her work gloves and proceeded to gather the eggs, with Dulce clucking and scratching and pecking behind her. She gathered eight dozen eggs, finding only two cracked. This unusually large number pleased her immensely since the hens laid fewer eggs in the fall. If she could collect the same number in the evening’s gathering, that would mean she would have sixteen dozen eggs for the day. Not a record, but more than she had expected.

On the way back to the egg-processing room, she picked up Dulce and carried her along, talking and making clucking noises at her. Dulce was one of the few hens that would allow herself to be picked up and carried without squawking and making a racket. An Ameraucauna, she wasn’t as hysterical by nature as some of the Leghorns were. The white Leghorns might be the best layers, but they had been known to start a riot in the chicken yard.

Leaving the door open, she put the hen on the ground outside to peck for bugs and plants while she worked with the new eggs. Then she stepped into clean coveralls and set about washing the eggs. All alone, working at her chores, she experienced a taste of why Clova was so lonely. Except for the occasional low of a cow, the call of a bird or the noise she made herself, Joanna heard not a sound.

To keep her company, she switched on the old radio that stayed on a shelf above the sink. As she sang along with a Carrie Underwood number, she heard Dulce’s clarion call just outside the door. Joanna looked out and saw the hen hopping to the ground from a large clay pot that was filled with a dead plant. Behind her, in the center of the plant, lay a fresh blue egg.

Joanna laughed. “Dulce, you take the cake. You are such a good hen.”

Dulce continued to cluck and strut proudly.

Once the eggs had been washed and laid out to dry, she set about cleaning inside her room. Her operation wasn’t subject to inspection by the USDA, but that didn’t mean she gave cleanliness and sanitation short shrift.

By the time she finished cleaning, the washed eggs had dried. She packed them into tan cardboard cartons decorated with her logo,
WALSH’S NATURALS, FARM-FRESH FREE-RANGE EGGS
, and put them away in the refrigerator. As she did this, her thoughts drifted to Clova’s oldest son again. Because he hadn’t called her home number, she had checked her office voice mail this morning to see if he had left a message. Nothing.

Her cell phone chirped and she keyed in to the call. “Lanita’s here,” her mother said. “Darrell took the kids fishin’, so she drove down here to see us.”

Joanna’s older sister lived up in Lubbock. Her husband was a high school teacher and coach, and Lanita worked as a loan processor for a mortgage broker. She hadn’t been to Hatlow in a couple of months. “I’ll come over,” Joanna said. “Have y’all had lunch?”

“Not yet. We was thinkin’ ’bout gettin’ some burgers at the Sonic.”

Joanna grinned. One thing she could count on was that Mom hadn’t gone out of her way to prepare a Sunday dinner for company. “I’m just ready to leave here,” Joanna said. “I’ll stop by and pick some up.”

She took a couple dozen eggs from the cooler to give to her sister, then closed up everything and washed her hands with disinfecting soap. She drove back to town, stopped off at Sonic and bought burgers, French fries and onion rings, then drove to the small ranch-style house of tan brick where she and Lanita had spent the first part of their lives.

Inside, she found Lanita watching one of Mom’s John Wayne movies. To her surprise, their mother was ironing a shirt. After saying hello and hugging her sister, Joanna turned to Mom. “You’re ironing?”

“I got to have clothes to wear,” her mother replied. “Since I ain’t got nobody else to do it, I got to, bad as I hate it. I like wearin’ cotton. It’s still too hot for polyester.”

No way did Joanna intend to be conned into doing Mom’s ironing. She studied her mother for a few seconds. She couldn’t recall a time when she had seen her enjoy any part of housekeeping or cooking. Joanna often wondered just exactly what part of married life Mom
had
enjoyed. “Do you have tea brewed? I didn’t buy any.”