A Rich Man for Dry Creek / a Hero for Dry Creek (27 page)

“We do now,” Nicki's mother announced with a flourish. “Garrett said you didn't have plans for Thanksgiving dinner so I took the liberty of inviting guests.”

“You mean Mrs. Hargrove?” Nicki hoped that was all her mother meant. That would be fine. She would have invited Mrs. Hargrove herself if they were having more than soup anyway.

“I mean the whole town of Dry Creek.”

“The whole town? That must be fifty, sixty people.”

“Seventy including me and Garrett. Eighty if we can reach everyone at the Elkton Ranch. Garth and his new wife, I think it is Sylvia, might have gone to Seattle—Jacob is going to call them and see. Even if they are not there, their ranch hands will probably like to come. I've never known a cowboy to turn down a turkey dinner.”

“We can't possibly—” Nicki tried to calculate just how many turkeys that would be.

“Don't worry—everyone's helping. The kids at the café agreed to bake the turkeys for us early tomorrow morning. And Jacob will help them bring them out to the ranch.”

“But we'd need pies and sweet potatoes and rolls—”

“We've got it organized. All you need to do is ride along with Garrett into Miles City to buy the food.”

“I haven't even dusted yet.” Nicki wondered if there might not be something to say for living out of a truck like Garrett did. No one ever expected him to entertain.

“Everything will be fine,” Nicki's mother said. “We're not fussy.”

“You—not fussy? You made Dad use a coaster when he drank water at the kitchen table. And it was Formica. It was made for water spills.”

“That was a long time ago. And it wasn't water he was drinking. I thought if I insisted on a coaster he would think twice before he drank in front of you kids.”

“Oh.”

“A child's eyes see everything,” Nicki's mother continued. “I knew Charles would hate himself if you and Reno didn't grow up to respect him. Next to the land, you were all he had.”

“He had you.”

Nicki's mother winced. “There's more to the story than you know.”

“Then tell me.”

Nicki could feel her mother measuring her.

“It's not just about me. But if I can, I'll tell you. I have to ask someone's permission first.”

“Is that why you're going to visit Dad's grave? To ask him if you can tell us it was all his fault?”

Nicki wondered if she was too old to run away from home. She had already lost her mother. She didn't want to have the memory of her father tarnished as well by hearing that he had displeased her mother because he drank too much. Even if her father had done that, her mother was probably the cause.

Another pair of footsteps sounded as someone stamped the snow off their shoes before opening the door to the hardware store.

“Everybody ready to go into Miles City,” Garrett said as he rubbed his hands together. He'd heard Mrs. Hargrove give the food calculations and he'd joked that he shouldn't have left his truck in Las Vegas. He'd surprised himself when he'd joked. Usually a holiday meal like Thanksgiving gave him a headache. But sitting down with the bunch of people he'd met in this little town didn't seem so bad.

Garrett wondered if something was wrong with him. He'd lived his life by one rule—keep moving in life because then everyone stays a stranger. It was a good rule. That way he didn't disappoint anyone, not even himself. Odd, how that rule no longer sounded very appealing to him.

N
icki glittered. She could see it out of the corner of her eyes. She hadn't put on any of the “pot of smudge” Glory had loaned her so she must have gotten sugar on her cheek when Mrs. Hargrove, who had been making pies all afternoon, hugged her. The fortunate thing was that in the darkened church no one cared if Nicki glittered or glowed or downright sparkled like Garrett did.

The day had quieted down and the church looked elegant in the candlelight. The work for the day was done, and all was peaceful except the rustling of little feet in the back pews of the old church. The church walls were white but the flickering of the candles turned the walls golden. Long shadows stretched along the walls as people filed into the church.

Nicki was wearing a plain navy pantsuit with a very ordinary silver pin. She'd looked at the makeup Glory had lent her and quietly set it aside. She could dress up like she was a princess but that wouldn't make her one. She needed to keep her feet firmly planted and, for her, that meant looking the way she always had. She knew there were no fairy-tale endings, and she needed to remember that Garrett was going to leave soon.

The fact that she had dressed plainly didn't mean that Garrett had. He was wearing the tuxedo again and he looked every bit as handsome as he had early this morning.

Even without the limousine, he took Nicki's breath away. But it wasn't just the tuxedo or the limo. She would have found him handsome if he was wearing an old jogging suit and standing beside a bicycle. All of which was why Nicki needed to keep her feet planted in reality. It would be all too easy to let herself become too attached to him. She needed to keep her heart safe.

Nicki and Garrett were on their date. The people of Dry Creek had given them their own pew in honor of the occasion. At least Nicki assumed that was why everyone said hello to them but no one stayed to sit beside them.

The evening had transformed Dry Creek.

All afternoon, everywhere Nicki looked, someone was chopping vegetables or peeling apples or grinding cranberries. She and Garrett had driven to Miles City and returned with enough bags of groceries to fill up the limousine. Nicki's mother had given them a wad of fifty-dollar bills, insisting the Thanksgiving dinner was on her.

By the time they got back to Dry Creek, the work teams were aproned and ready to go. Mrs. Hargrove took the ingredients for the pies and her helpers went with her to her house to bake. Jazz and Linda took the turkeys and the bread for the stuffing. Glory and Matthew were in charge of vegetables and took the bags of green beans, muttering something about hoping the twins liked to snap things.

Even Elmer had been put in charge of the butter when Lillian remembered he liked to carve. He was commissioned to shape the butter into five large turkeys with lines fine enough to show the feathers.

Nicki had volunteered to bake pies, but her mother said she and Garrett were needed back at the ranch to clean the main room in the bunkhouse and put up enough sawhorse tables to seat eighty people.

“We used to get over a hundred people in there when we had guests before,” Lillian had said when Nicki had started to protest. “The room can't have shrunk. We get ten to a table and you can fit eight tables in there easy if you put them sideways where the beds used to go.”

The bunkhouse had had cowboys sleeping in it for over a hundred years, and the metal legs of the beds left scars that still could be seen in the hardwood floors. Nicki supposed if you matched the bed markings you could get eight tables. There used to be sixteen beds, eight on each half of the bunkhouse.

Garrett drove Nicki back to the ranch in the limousine while her mother stayed in Dry Creek to help with the food.

If everyone hadn't been so intent on their tasks, Nicki would have suspected they had conspired to leave her and Garrett alone. But they didn't give the two of them a second glance when she and Garrett pulled out of town so Nicki decided they'd just paired Garrett with her because he looked strong enough to swing a sawhorse around. She would need that kind of help to set up the tables.

Once Nicki decided she and Garrett were just a work team, she didn't have any trouble talking to him. She'd started out where she'd usually start with a new ranch hand. She'd told him stories about the early days of the ranch. She even told him about the time the cowboys on the ranch had sent back East for a bride and then played poker all winter trying to decide who would get to woo the young woman first.

In turn, Garrett told her about some of the places where he'd driven with Big Blue—how the trees of Tennessee were thick and green and the ocean off the Florida coast was pale blue in the morning.

It wasn't until they opened the closet and found the old pair of children's ballet shoes, however, that they started talking about themselves. Nicki had forgotten about the shoes. Her mother hadn't always been disappointed in her. When Nicki was small, she and her mother had loved to dance together in the kitchen, twirling on the old linoleum until they collapsed in a tangle of giggles. Somehow, after her mother left, Nicki had forgotten there were any good times. When Garrett responded by telling her about his dad dying of liver failure and all of the lonely days he had spent waiting for his father to be a father to him, they both knew they were friends.

Now that they were on their date, sitting in the church that was lit by candlelight, however, the ease of the friendship wasn't the same. Nicki couldn't think of a thing to say. Garrett in overalls was a lot easier to talk to than Garrett in a tuxedo.

“The flowers are lovely,” Nicki repeated for the tenth time. She still didn't know when Garrett had slipped away in the grocery store to buy the two red roses. It must have been when she was asking the produce clerk how many yams eighty people might eat if they also had mashed potatoes. “And they're perfect in this vase.”

Garrett hadn't stopped with the roses. He'd bought a tiny glass vase that had room for the roses and for a single white taper candle.

His first thought had been to get the biggest vase and the biggest bouquet of flowers that the store had. But then he'd seen the vase that also doubled as a candle holder and he knew he'd found what Nicki would like the best.

“I've never had a prettier candle for the service.” Nicki usually followed the old cowboy tradition of melting enough wax in the bottom of a cup to make a candle stick to it. She'd usually just used one of the half-melted, broken candles she kept in a kitchen drawer for when the electricity failed. It might be a white candle or a red candle left from a previous Christmas. But the candle had never been special, and she seldom had anything new to say when she stood up and listed what she was thankful for that year. Over the years she had usually mentioned the ranch or her 4-H calf or something. “I should have gotten a better holder for you.”

Garrett grinned. “I'm happy with my cup candle.”

Garrett hadn't been to church more than twice in his life and this was nothing like those two other experiences. There were no women in hats and no rustle of important people. People here came in old knit scarves that had been washed until they were all the same colorless gray. Some wore jeans with shiny knees and jackets that were frayed. But they all seemed humbly glad to be together. They smiled and shook hands with each other as though they were longtime friends. Garrett supposed they were.

He wondered why that thought depressed him. He might not have a roomful of friends, but he'd probably seen more different cities than anyone in the church here. That had to count for something. Besides, he could feel Nicki's arm as she sat beside him. He wasn't quite without friends.

Garrett inched a little closer to Nicki. When Nicki had showed him those ballet shoes this afternoon, he had realized that someone else had had a lonely childhood beside himself. Sharing with Nicki had made him feel less of a loner. He supposed it didn't change anything, but he'd realized he wanted Nicki to remember him when he was gone. Usually, he wanted the women he met to forget him as soon as he pulled out of town. But not Nicki.

Nicki wondered if anyone could see her blush in the candlelight. She didn't know if she had moved closer to Garrett or if he had moved closer to her, but she suspected it was she who had done the moving. There was something about the darkness that made her want to be closer to him.

Garrett looked around the small church. “I don't see Lester.”

“He'll be a little late.” Nicki wondered for the first time why Lester always came to church just as it was almost over. It was as though he wanted points for attending, but didn't really want to be there.

“Oh.” Garrett wondered if he could get Nicki to leave the service before Lester arrived. No, he supposed not. Especially not now that it looked like it was going to start.

Mrs. Hargrove stood and walked to the piano beside the altar. The piano playing signaled the beginning of the service and everyone was looking forward as the pastor rose and went to stand behind the altar.

“Each year in Dry Creek, we come together as a community and give thanks for what we have.” The pastor looked out over the group of people assembled and smiled.

“We started doing this in the late 1890s when the Redfern Ranch had a harvest dinner that brought everyone from miles around together. Before this town began, we moved the tradition to the back of Webster's store and called it our Thanksgiving Eve service. Today we celebrate here. No matter where it has been held, we have kept the same spirit of thankfulness. Together this community has survived droughts and depressions. Together we've seen good years and bad years. We've seen children born and grow up and move away. We've welcomed strangers and said goodbye to friends. Let's again be thankful for what this year has brought to us. Bring your candle in your own time and share with us what God has done for you.”

Garth Elkton and his new bride, were the first to come to the altar. They carried a candleholder made of dozens of old keys. One fat white candle rose from the key base.

“The kids in Seattle made this for us for tonight so we came back early,” Garth said proudly. He'd met Sylvia while she was director of a youth center that helped troubled teenagers. “We're thankful that they are doing well and are coming back this summer for a full six weeks. They told us that the old keys stand for old habits they are throwing aside.”

A murmur of approval went through the congregation as Garth lit their candle. The Seattle kids had been popular with the people of Dry Creek.

“And what about your new bride?” someone yelled from the back of the church. “What's she thankful for?”

“She's thankful for him,” Nicki whispered to Garrett. Marriage had transformed Garth into a man who couldn't stop smiling, but Sylvia still told everyone she was the luckiest one. “She found someone who shared her dream.”

“The camp for the kids.” Garrett nodded. He had heard about the Seattle youngsters who were putting down roots in Dry Creek even though they had only been here for one month last winter. Many of the kids still wrote letters to the town of Dry Creek and the townspeople took turns writing back.

The next ones to bring their candles to the front of the church were the Curtis twins, the two six-year-old boys that belonged to the minister and his new wife. Their blond heads were bent as they carried two tin can holders to the altar. When they set the holders on the altar, their father reached out to light their candles from the main candle on the altar.

Nicki could see that the twins had made their candleholders from two identical aluminum cans. They had each cut out a figure in the can so the light from the candle would show through. One figure had wings and had to be an angel. The figure in the other can looked more like a mortal woman.

“We're thankful because we have two mommies now,” the first twin boy said.

“And one of them's still an angel,” the other boy added eagerly. “Mrs. Hargrove says. Our first mommy is our guardian angel and she flies over us with her supersonic wings that go zoom-zoom.”

“All I said was that I'm sure she's watching out for you boys if there's any way she can,” Mrs. Hargrove added from where she sat at the piano. “She knows that we need all the help we can get with that particular task.”

The adults in the church smiled.

“And angels don't zoom around,” Mrs. Hargrove added indulgently.

“They don't need to,” one of the twins agreed. “They have those wings that fly like this.” The twins demonstrated how angels fly as they flew back to the pew where they were sitting with their new mother, Glory.

“Those are the cutest little boys,” Nicki whispered to Garrett.

He nodded in agreement.

Mrs. Hargrove left the piano and was the next one to bring her candles to the altar.

“Mrs. Hargrove brings candles for all of the Hargroves,” Nicki whispered to Garrett as they watched the older woman bring two heavy silver candelabrum to the front. “I think she's up to twenty-two candles that she lights and for each one she mentions a relative by name.”

“The Hargroves are grateful,” Mrs. Hargrove began. “Two new babies in the family this year and Doris June is coming home next summer to stay for a spell with me.”