McKettrick land, Cheyenne Bridges thought stoically, as she
stood next to her rented car on a gravel pullout alongside
the highway, one hand shading her eyes from the Arizona sun.
A faint drumbeat throbbed in her ears, an underground river
flowing beneath her pulse, and she remembered a time she
could not have remembered. An era when only the
Great Spirit could lay claim to the valleys and canyons and
mesas, to the arch of the sky, blue as her grandmother's
favorite sugar bowlโa cherished premium plucked from some
long-ago flour sackโto the red dirt and the scattered stands
of white oak and Joshua and ponderosa pine.
It had taken Angus McKettrick, and other intrepidly arrogant
nineteenth-century pioneers like him, to fence in these
thousands of square miles, to pen their signatures to deeds,
to run cattle and dig wells and wrest a living from the
rocky, thistle-strewn soil. Old Angus had passed that
audacious sense of ownership on to his sons, and the sons of
their sons, down through the generations.
McKettricks forever and ever, amen.
Cheyenne bit her lower lip. Her cell phone, lying on the
passenger seat of the car, chimed like an arriving
elevatorโNigel again. She ignored the insistent sound until
it stopped, only too aware that the reprieve would be
fleeting. Meanwhile, the land itself seemed to seep into her
heart, rising like water finding its level in some dank,
forgotten cistern.
The feeling was bittersweet, a complex tangle of loneliness
and homecoming and myriad other emotions she couldn't
readily identify.
She had sworn never to come back to this place.
Never to set eyes on Jesse McKettrick again.
And fate, in its inimitable way, was forcing her to do both
those things.
She sighed.
An old blue pickup passed on the road, horn honking in
exuberant greeting. A trail of cheerfully mournful country
music thrummed in its wake, and the peeling sticker on the
rear bumper read Save The Cowboys.
Cheyenne waved, self-conscious in her trim black designer
suit and high heels. This was boots-and-jeans country, and
she'd stand out like the proverbial sore thumb the
moment she drove into town.
Welcome home, she thought ruefully.
The cell chirped again, and she picked her way through the
loose gravel to reach in through the open window and grabbed it.
"It's about time you answered," Nigel Meerland
snapped before she could draw a breath to say hello. "I
was beginning to think you'd fallen into some manhole."
"There aren't any manholes in Indian Rock,"
Cheyenne replied, making her way around to the driver's
side and opening the door.
"Have you contacted him yet?" Nigel didn't
bother with niceties like "Hi, how are you?" either
in person or over the telephone. He simply demanded what he
wantedโand most of the time, he got it.
"Nigel," Cheyenne said evenly, "I just got here.
So,
no, I have not contacted him."
Him
was Jesse McKettrick. The last person in this or any
other universe she wanted to seeโnot that Jesse would be
able to place her in the long line of adoring women strung
out behind him like the cars of a derailed freight train.
"Well, you're burning daylight, kiddo," Nigel
shot back. Her boss was in his late thirties and English,
but he liked using colorful terms, with a liberal smattering
of clichรฉs.
Westernisms, he called them.
"Let's get this show on the road. I don't have
to tell you how anxious our investors are to get that condo
development underway."
No, Cheyenne thought, sitting down sideways on the
car seat, constrained by her tight skirt and swinging her
legs in under the steering wheel,
you don't
have to tell me. I've heard nothing else for the
last six months.
"Jesse won't sell," she said. Realizing
she'd spoken the thought aloud, she closed her eyes,
braced for the inevitable response.
"He
has to sell," Nigel countered.
"Failure is not an option. Everythingโand I mean
everythingโis riding on this deal. If the finance
people pull out, the company will go under. You won't
have a job, and I'll have to crawl back to the ancestral
pile on my knees, begging for the scant privileges of a
second son."
Cheyenne closed her eyes. Like Nigel, she had a lot at
stake. More than just her job. She had Mitch, her younger
brother, to consider. And her mother.
The bonus Nigel had promised, in writing, would give them
all a kind of security they'd never known.
The pit of her stomach clenched.
"I know," she told Nigel bleakly. "I know."
"Get cracking, Pocahontas," Nigel instructed, and
hung up in her ear.
Cheyenne opened her eyes, pressed the end button with her
thumb, drew a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she
tossed the phone onto the other seat, started the engine and
headed for Indian Rock.
The town hadn't changed much since she'd left it at
seventeen, bound for college down in Tucson.
There was the dry cleaners, the library, the elementary
school. And the small, white-steepled church where she'd
struggled to understand Commandments and arks and burning
bushes, and had placed quarters, after unwrapping them
carefully from a cheap cloth handkerchief, in the collection
plate.
She sat a little straighter in the seat as she drove the
length of Main Street, signaled and turned left at the old
train depot, long since converted to an antiques minimall.
The rental car bumped over the railroad tracks, past
progressively seedier trailer courts, through a copse of
cottonwood trees.
The narrow beams of the ancient cattle guard rattled under
the tires.
Cheyenne gave a grateful sigh when the car didn't fall
through and slowed to round the last bend in the narrow dirt
road leading to the house.
Like the single and double-wides she'd just passed, the
place had gone downhill in her absence. The lawn was
overgrown and coils of rusty barbed wire littered the
ground. The porch sagged and the siding, scavenged and
nailed to the walls without regard to color, jarred the eye.
Gram had been so proud of her house and yard. It would break
her heart to see it now.
Her mother's old van, a patchwork affair like the house,
stood in the driveway with the side door open.
Cheyenne had hoped for a few days to settle in before her
mother and brother arrived from Phoenix, and at least put in
a ramp for Mitch's wheelchair, but it wasn't to be.
Her heart fluttered with anticipation, then sank.
She put the rental in Park and shut off the motor, surveying
the only real home she'd ever had.
"I'll show you an ancestral
pile,
Nigel," she muttered. "Just hop in your Bentley
and drive on up to Indian Rock, Arizona."
The front door swung open just then, and Ayanna Bridges
appeared on the porch, wearing a faded cotton dress,
high-topped sneakers and a tentative smile. Her straight
ebony hair fell past her waist, loosely restrained by a
tarnished silver bar-rette she'd probably owned since
the 1960s. When her mother started toward the rickety steps,
Cheyenne got out of the car.
"Look," Ayanna called, pointing. "I found some
old boards out behind the shed and dragged them around to
make a ramp. Mitch whizzed right up to them like he was on
flat ground."
Life had forced Ayanna to be resourceful. Makeshift ramps
for her son's wheelchair were the least of her
accomplishments. She'd waited tables, often pulling two
shifts, grappled with various social-service agencies to get
Mitch the medical care he needed, sold cosmetics and miracle
vitamins, all without a twinge of self-pityโat least, not
one she'd ever allowed her children to see.
Cheyenne scrounged up a smile. Pretended to admire the pair
of teetering, weathered two-by-fours, each with one end
propped on the porch floor and one disappearing into the
weedy grass. Doubtless, Mitch had used them to alight from
the van, too.
Ifโ
whenโthe bonus came through, Cheyenne planned to
buy a new van, specially equipped with a hydraulic lift and
maybe even hand controls. For now, they would have to make
do, as they'd always done.
"Good work," she said.
Ayanna met her in the middle of the yard, enfolding Cheyenne
in a hug that made her breath catch and her eyes burn.
She blinked a couple of times before meeting her
mother's fond gaze.
"Where's Mitch?" Cheyenne asked.
"Inside," Ayanna said, her words gently hushed.
"I'm afraid he's brooding againโhe misses his
friends in Phoenix. He'll be all right once he's had
a little while to get used to being here."
Cheyenne could empathize. She thought, with poignant
longing, of her one-bedroom condo in sunny San Diego, half a
mile from the beach. She'd sublet it, and that was
another worry. If she couldn't convince Jesse McKettrick
to part with five hundred acres of prime real estate, she
not only wouldn't have a job, she'd have to stay in
Indian Rock, find whatever work there was to be had and
stockpile pennies until she could afford to start over
somewhere else.
As she stood there despairing, Nigel's cellphone comment
blew through her spirit like a cold wind scouring the walls
of a lonely canyon.
Everything's riding on this
deal. And I mean everything.
"Come on inside, honey," Ayanna said, taking
Cheyenne's arm when she would have turned and fled back
to the rental car. "We can bring your things in later."
Cheyenne nodded, ashamed that she'd come so close, after
all her preparation and effort, to fleeing the scene.
Ayanna smiled, butted her taller daughter lightly with the
outside of one shoulder. "We've all come home,"
she said softly. "You and Mitch and me. And home is a
great place to start over."
Home might be a "great place to start over,"
Cheyenne reflected grimly, if you were a McKet-trick. If
your key fit the lock of one of the several sprawling,
rustically elegant houses standing sturdily on a section of
the legendary Triple M Ranch.
If your name was Bridges, on the other hand, and you were
the daughter of a charming but compulsive gambler who'd
died in jail, and a hardworking but fatally codependent
dreamer like Ayanna, making a clean-slate beginning was a
luxury you couldn't afford.
Ordinary people had to settle for survival.
Nurleen Gentry shuffled and dealt the flopโ a pair of sevens
and a queen. Once the cards were down, lying helter-skelter
on the scruffy green-felt tabletop, she folded her hands,
glittering with fake diamonds ordered from the shopping
channel, and waited.
Jesse leaned back in his customary chair in the card room
behind Lucky's Main Street Bar and Grill and pretended
to consider his options. He felt the eyes of the other poker
players on him, through the stale and shifting haze of
blue-gray cigarette smoke, and gave nothing away.
"Bet or fold, McKettrick," Wade Parker grumbled from
the other side of the table. Jesse allowed one corner of his
mouth to crook up, ever so slightly, in the go-to-hell grin
he'd been perfecting since he was eleven. Wade wore a
bad rug and a windbreaker emblazoned with the logo of the
beer company he worked for, and his full lips twitched with
impatience. The tobacco smudge rose from the cheap cigar
smoldering in the ashtray beside him.
Next to Wade was Don Rogers, who owned the Laundromat. Don
squirmed on the patched vinyl seat of his chair, but Jesse
knew it wasn't the wait that bothered the other man. Don
was a neat freak and wanted to tidy the flop so badly that a
muscle under his right eye jerked. Touching anybody's
cards but his own could get a man shot in some parts, though
the retribution would be neither swift nor terrible in the
old hometown.
Could be Don had pocket queens, Jesse thought, but that
didn't seem likely. When it came to tells, Don was
easier to read than the twelve-foot limestone letters set
into the slope east of town, spelling out INDIAN ROCK.
Everything about Don said, WINGING IT.
Jesse made a show of pondering myriad possibilities, then
accordioned four fifty-dollar chips into the pot.
"Shit," Don muttered, and put down his cards without
revealing them, one precisely on top of the other.
Wade leaned forward, his bushy eyebrows raised. Nurleen, an
old hand at dealing poker and a better-than-fair player
herself, though her specialty was Omaha, not Texas Hold
'Em, said nothing, but simply looked on with intense
disinterest.
"I think you're bluffing, McKettrick," Wade
said. He rifled his chips, which had been growing steadily
for the last half hour.
"Think what you like," Jesse countered, without
inflection. He'd already thrown in a couple of winning
hands, just to support Wade's delusion that the poker
gods were lined up solidly behind him, armed for battle.
Jesse had time, and he had moneyโa deadly combination, in
poker or just about any other endeavor.
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