Coming Home to Texas--A Clean Romance Read online

  “That may be how most people operate, but not me. I look at facts. I’m not led by emotion.”

  “Most of the time you’re not. But when it comes to Tony, you kind of are. Anyway, I don’t think this has anything to do with a person’s temperament. It’s something everyone does. Confirmation bias, that’s what it’s called. We see things through these lenses of prejudice, and we make the narrative fit what we already believe.”

  The words felt like a slap in the face—all the more so in light of Lauren’s own history of wildly distorted perceptions regarding matters of the heart. Lauren had all the relationship savvy and decision-making acumen of a strawberry daiquiri. Every time she latched onto a new guy, she came up with a fantastic web of garbled logic to explain why this one was destined for her on some cosmic level—and there’d been hordes of guys, all more or less losers. But Dalia had never mocked. Her policy was to say what she thought one time, and then zip it. Over and over, she’d listened with the patience of a saint and waited for Lauren to realize the truth for herself—and she’d always helped pick up the pieces after the inevitable heartbreak.

  And this was what Lauren served up now, in Dalia’s hour of need?

  “Okay, so I don’t have forensic evidence. What about a confession? Is that good enough?”

  “Did he really confess, though? What exactly did he say? Did he say, ‘Yes, I cheated on you’?”

  “He didn’t deny it.”

  “But that’s not the same thing, is it?”

  Dalia opened her mouth and shut it again. What had he said, exactly? Was it possible Lauren was right? Had she somehow misjudged the situation all those years ago?

  “I’ve got to go,” Dalia said.

  “You’re mad, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Please don’t be mad, Dalia. You’re my best friend.”

  “I’m not mad!”

  Dalia heard the sharpness in her own voice, stopped and said more calmly, “I just have to go. I’ve got things to do. I’ll talk to you later. Have fun rock climbing.”

  She signed off before Lauren could say anything more and sat at her desk for a while, staring out the window. Outside, the flatbed from the lumberyard was depositing a load of strapped-together two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and such. It was a long, noisy process, with lots of beeps and clanks and hydraulic hisses, lots of ooching forward and pausing and ooching forward again, as the bright lumber came rolling backward along some metal pipes, then gradually tilting off the end of the trailer. Tony and Alex ran around putting four-by-four boards underneath where the lumber was going, to keep it from resting directly on the ground. Then Tony shouted something at the driver, the truck went forward and the edge of the load dropped off the back of the trailer.

  And suddenly Tony turned around and was looking straight at her.

  And smiling.

  The smile wasn’t intended for her. He was probably just glad to have the lumber successfully unloaded, or maybe he was laughing at something Alex said. But it sent a shot of pure sweetness through her. Her anger fell away, and all at once it was like the past didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered but that smile. Those eyes. How it would feel to be in those arms, right now.

  It lasted less than a second. Then his eyes clouded, the smile faltered and he looked away. If that wasn’t guilt, then what was it?

  All the sweetness she’d felt turned into a hard lump of lead in her chest. She turned her back to him. She had to get out of here.

  She pulled on her riding boots and took her .357 Magnum down from the top shelf, along with her thigh holster. A few minutes later she was heading out the back door, away from the lumber and Tony.

  The grass was unusually lush and green for September, with patches of abnormally tall sunflowers. A cool front had come in overnight, taking the edge off the late-summer heat.

  A horse was grazing in the paddock north of the house—a golden-brown horse with black points and a black dorsal stripe running from mane to tail.

  Dalia put her fingers in her mouth and whistled.

  The horse’s head shot up and his ears perked. He let out a whinny and ran to her.

  Dalia’s dad had trained all the livestock to come when called. For cattle, he used a long, piercing yell that rose in pitch at the end. She used to love to hear that high whooping cry ring out across the pasture and see the cows come running.

  Buck reached the fence and put his head close to Dalia’s, whuffling softly, as if it had been only a few days since she’d last called him to her, instead of more years than she cared to count. Nothing wrong with his memory. Her throat got tight as she scratched his chest and felt his whiskers tickling her face. He smelled of grass and sunshine.

  She led him through the gate to the feed barn, where the tack was stored in a lean-to. His feet looked all right, but it was about time to get the farrier out, and he clearly hadn’t been groomed in a while. She added a reminder to her phone to ask her mom when his teeth had last been floated. Maybe she’d arrange for the equine dentist to come out while she was here. Dealing with horse health care would be a lot more relaxing than dealing with Tony, and it needed to be done.

  By the time Dalia had Buck saddled and was riding him along the fence line, the last lingering tension over her conversation with Lauren had dissolved.

  La Escarpa was divided into two distinct elevations and topographies. Northwest was all rolling hills and rocky soil, typical Hill Country. Southeast was flatter, with a mixture of red-and-black clay and sandy loam. In between, following a rough diagonal, was a slope, abrupt in parts and gentler in others. This was the “scarp” of La Escarpa, basically the Balcones Fault in miniature.

  The house and barns stood on the hilly side, safe from floods. There was good pasture in the lowland, what her mother always referred to as “the Houston-y part.” Fewer cedars, more oaks and elms.

  They followed the horse trail east, to a fence that separated the home pasture from the lower elevation. Dalia opened the gate, rode through and closed it again without dismounting, keeping her eyes open for danger—rattlesnakes, wild hogs, rabid skunks.

  They headed down the switchback that made the slope manageable, and south to the first fork in the trail, where Buck flicked his ear back, ready to be told what to do. They went left, crossed the creek and went left again to loop around the low acreage.

  It was so restful, being around animals. You didn’t need many words with them. You communicated with them mostly through body language and energy, the same way they communicated with each other. They didn’t expect you to make small talk, or tell you how you ought to smile more. They didn’t push you to share your feelings. They didn’t lie or cheat or make ridiculous speeches about the unreliability of memory. They were the best company. Some of the most peaceful hours of her life had been spent riding this trail, with Merle loping behind in his tireless border collie gait.

  “A merle-coated dog called Merle, and a buckskin horse called Buck. Seriously?”

  Tony’s voice twined its way through her thoughts, gently playful. He’d been appalled by the lack of imagination in her animal names. He’d teased her about it a lot, but never in a mean way. That was one thing about Tony: he was never mean. He kept up an unending stream of bizarre alternative names—Merle Haggard, Merlin the Magician, Merlin Brando. Bucky, Buckster, Buckleberry Finn, even Sergeant Barnes, as in Bucky Barnes. They always made her smile.

  She was smiling now.

  She gave her head a shake, trying to knock Tony out of her mind.

  The trail curved more or less northward, around a big stock pond with a pair of ducks out for a swim. She and Tony had their first kiss here, if you didn’t count that one in seventh grade. She’d brought him here during Marcos’s last-ever pasture party, that sweet-scented spring evening before Marcos left for Marine boot camp. They’d sat together on the grassy bank and watched a
s a family of raccoons came to wash their food at the edge of the moonlit water.

  And then she kissed him—or he kissed her. Afterward, she wasn’t sure who had made the first move, and anyway, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was they’d both wanted to do this for a long, long time, and it was finally happening. And then his arms went around her and her hands were in his hair, and just as he started slowly lowering them both to the ground, a rutting axis buck showed up, crashing through the brush, stamping his hooves and bellowing—and Tony shot straight into the air and let out a scream unlike anything Dalia had ever heard before. She had never laughed so long or so hard in her life. He’d looked so funny, with the whites of his eyes showing all the way around the irises, and his hair standing on end like a cartoon character.

  “Stop it!”

  She said the words out loud, startling Buck, who shied a bit and glanced back.

  She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down, and laid a reassuring hand against Buck’s neck. She had to get a grip. This was her childhood home. Tony had no business hijacking her memories.

  At the top of the curve, the trail was joined by a second switchback coming down from the scarp. Then it turned southward, following the east fence that ran along Ybarra Road.

  Once the trail rounded the bend, she forgot about Tony for a while. Something was off. And the farther south she rode, the worse it got. It was like she’d strayed onto someone else’s property, or into some Twilight Zone version of La Escarpa. She actually looked around to make sure she was in the right place, but no, the fences were all where they were supposed to be, and the general topography was right.

  But everything else was wrong.

  The low acreage had its own road access, was off the highway and couldn’t be seen from the house—all of which made it an ideal partying spot for rural teenagers. Marcos’s friends used to drive on in, turn their music up, let their tailgates down and bring out kegs and coolers of cheap beer.

  But anyone who tried that today would just get his tires punctured and his paint scratched from all the encroaching mesquite brush.

  You had to be vigilant with mesquite. It was incredibly hardy, drought-resistant and quick to resprout. Without proper management, it could dominate a pasture, drastically reducing forage and generally getting in the way and making a nuisance of itself.

  This pasture hadn’t quite been taken over yet, but it was well on its way. Already it looked like the sort of pasture that used to make her dad shudder when he drove past.

  When did this happen? How had things gotten this bad? She felt a surge of anger at Marcos and Eliana for not telling her, for not doing more to help out. But that wasn’t fair. Why should everything be their responsibility? La Escarpa was her home, too, and she’d stayed away longer than either of them.

  Okay, then. She was here now, wasn’t she? She’d get things sorted.

  For starters, this whole southeast pasture needed to be root-plowed. That would mean less grass for the cattle in the short term, and holding on to the hay from the south parcel instead of selling it, but in the long run it meant better grazing. The cattle guard was more than half-filled with gravel—runoff from those low spots in the roadbed, no doubt. It should be dug out and relaid, and the roadbed regraded, with a yard or so of fresh gravel. The fencing was a mess, overgrown with hackberries and icicle cactus. It ought to be cleared and restrung. Wasn’t there some new alternative to barbed wire, some sort of superstrong smooth wire that was stretched incredibly tight? She ought to look into that. Run cost comparisons. Weigh pros and cons.

  If she and Tony had gotten married, maybe they’d be casually shopping for acreage of their own by now.

  If they’d had the same week off for spring break, sophomore year, maybe they’d have spent it together in boring old Limestone Springs, instead of her going home with Lauren to Pennsylvania one week and Tony heading to South Padre on a football team debauch fest the next. A guy with his looks and personality, on a beach filled with partying college students—he’d have had to fight tooth and nail not to cheat.

  He’d called her one night from the island. She was back in school again, studying hard, forcing herself not to call or text too much, because she was not a weak, silly, clingy, insecure girlfriend.

  Right away she knew something was wrong. It was nothing obvious like wild party sounds in the background or blatant inebriation. But there was something off in his tone, something almost excessively sweet and affectionate. Exactly how Tony would sound if he did cheat, as she later realized. He’d be sorry after, of course he would, but he couldn’t take it back.

  Then things got weirder still. Tony’s end of the conversation got disjointed, with random questions, and answers that didn’t fit what Dalia was saying, finally ending with, “Ha ha, yeah, that sounds great. Look, I gotta go, okay? I’ll talk to you later. Love you.”

  The love you sounded strange, kind of forced and tacked on, and he hung up before she could say I love you, too.

  The weirdness didn’t end there. Tony kept acting off in their conversations, with a strained quality to his affection that had never been there before. Tony, the most spontaneous and transparent person she knew, actually sounded fake.

  Finally, things came to a head in that fight over the phone, and the next day she boxed up his stuff and put it in the mail.

  I should be grateful, she’d told herself. I’m lucky it happened now and not later, after I’d actually married him.

  It wasn’t much consolation. She wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hurt like that and still function. Lauren was a godsend, unfailing in sympathy and comfort. Now Lauren had betrayed her, as well, casting doubt on whether Tony had cheated at all. It was ridiculous, but...what if she was right?

  That flare of temper Tony had shown at the lumberyard had looked so real. Tony was a lot of things, but a hardened pathological liar wasn’t one of them. If he’d done it, he’d be embarrassed, defensive, deflective. Not angry.

  And what if he hadn’t cheated? What if the phone call and the behavior afterward meant something else entirely?

  They were heading westward now. They closed the loop, crossed back over the creek where they’d crossed it before, and reached the fork again. Buck flicked his ear back, waiting for the go-ahead. They could go home the way they’d come, or make another left and loop around the low acreage to the southwest.

  Dalia turned him toward home. She’d ridden long enough for her first time back in the saddle.

  They climbed the switchback and reached the scarp gate. The truck from the lumberyard was gone, and there was no sign of Tony or Alex. As Dalia closed the gate behind her, she saw something moving around in the orchard that looked suspiciously like her mother. She rode on over and halted Buck at the orchard fence. Yep, there was her mom, scurrying around on her crutches, with chickens fluttering along behind her like she was the Pied Piper.

  “Mom, what are you doing out here? You should be inside resting your foot.”

  She’d said the same thing so many times that it was starting to lose its meaning.

  “One of my Brahmas is acting funny,” Mom said. “I think she’s hiding a nest somewhere. I’ve got to find it and make her stop.”

  “I could have done that for you.”

  “I couldn’t wait for you to get back. I’ve been trying for days to catch her in the act. Just now I was taking the trash out when I heard her give a loud celebratory squawk, and I just knew she’d laid an egg. I had to hurry out before I could forget exactly where she was when she did it.”

  Dalia suppressed the urge to remind her mother that she could have taken the trash out for her, too.

  “Did you find the nest?” she asked instead.

  Mom sighed. “No. I guess she was just having me on.”

  Buck chose that exact moment to blow loudly through his nose, as if to say, Chickens. Honestly.r />
  “So,” Dalia said, “I just rode down to the low acreage and—”

  Mom cringed. “I know, I know. The mesquites are taking over. Travis was supposed to take care of that, but clearly he had better things to do.”

  “Who’s Travis?”

  “My latest former hired man. He lit out for Texarkana back in June.”

  “June? That’s three months ago! Why haven’t you gotten anyone else?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly have applicants beating my door down! Hired men are hard to find and harder to keep. The ones who’re any good always want a place of their own, and sooner or later they get it. And the ones who aren’t any good, aren’t any good! I’ve had thirteen hired men in the past four years, and half that time I haven’t had any hired man at all.”

  “Well, hired man or no hired man, something’s got to be done about that pasture.”

  “I know. I’ll get the Mendoza boys to come out. They do land clearing.”

  “You ought to get them to clear the fence line and redo the cattle guard while they’re at it.”

  Her mom shook her head. “No. I can’t afford all that.”

  You can’t afford for the cattle to get out, either, Dalia thought, but she held her tongue. If the money wasn’t there, then it just wasn’t there. It didn’t seem right that the kitchen rebuild could go forward while the ranch work stalled out for lack of funds. But the rebuild was coming out of insurance money.

  “Go back inside and put your foot up,” Dalia said. “I’ll get Buck taken care of and then heat up some dinner. And tomorrow I’ll make it my mission to outsmart your egg-hiding Brahma.”

  She dismounted outside the feed barn, led Buck to the door—

  And there was Tony.