Cowboy Sing Me Home (27 page)

Melinda had been pretty evasive after her
doctor visit, refusing to let him come in the exam room with her or even talk
to Dr. Buchanan.  She assured him she and the baby were both fine, that
lightheadedness was a common symptom during pregnancy.  But still, he would
feel better if he could go hear the heartbeat himself.

“Geralyn?”
            “Mmm?”  She poked around at his leg, then turned her head to meet
his eyes.

“Is Melinda really doing okay? She told me
everything looked good.”

“Sure, she’s good.”

“And the baby?”

“Mmmm,” she said again, writing something
on his chart.  She looked up, her brows raised and a blank smile on her face. 
“What baby?”

“Melinda’s baby.”

“Melinda has a baby?  When did that
happen?”

Luke’s world, already off kilter, tilted a
little more.  His hands clutched the sheets, and his lips went numb as he said,
“I mean the baby she’s carrying now.  She’s pregnant now.”

Geralyn shook her head.  “Melinda’s not
pregnant.  I just saw her two days ago and she took a pregnancy test then.”

Everything in Luke’s body went numb, and
the blood thundered in his ears.  He must have looked pretty bad, if Geralyn’s
expression was any indication.  She dropped the clipboard onto the bedside
table and gasped.

“Luke!  She told you she was pregnant? 
And I just – oh my God, I am in so much trouble.”

“It’s okay,” he said, his mouth dry.

“No, listen, I’ve just violated hospital
policy and all kinds of HIPAA laws, if anyone ever finds out I told you.”

He didn’t see how anyone would ever know,
and he told Geralyn so, his mind on the way Melinda had rambled on about how
weak she felt.  He’d been sick with worry over the baby, and tried to work up
some concern for Melinda, too. 

And she’d been lying the whole time.

He made the appropriate assurances to
Geralyn that no one would ever learn of their conversation, while his mind
reeled through a dizzying whirl of thoughts and emotions. 

There was no baby.  There never had been.

He was angry, embarrassed, even, that
Melinda had fooled him so easily.  Angry for the worry she’d caused him. 
Relieved that he didn’t have to go through with marrying her.

But above it all, and deeper than any,
running through everything now like a thick brown river, was an overwhelming
sense of loss.

He didn’t have a baby.  During the past
two days, the knowledge that he had a child had been at the front of his mind. 
A child growing, getting ready to come in and color his life.  A child no
bigger than his thumb now, but that would soon be a tow-headed boy with a
stickhorse, or a pink-cheeked, ribbon-haired girl.  A child that would
re-introduce him to the wonder and magic of the world.  The comfort and joy
he’d derived from this knowledge was so much sweeter for being unexpected.  He
never expected to have a child.  And he never expected to love it before he’d
even seen it.

But he didn’t have a baby, and he never
had.

Geralyn scooted a chair up to the bed and
took his hand.  “Maybe I’m wrong, Luke.  I’ve been working a lot of hours
lately.  Maybe I got her confused with someone else.”

“We both know you didn’t.”

She was silent for a moment, then squeezed
his hand.  “I’m sorry.  But you can try again.  Like I said, Melinda’s healthy,
there’s no reason – “

She broke off when she saw the look on his
face.  She bit her lip, but nodded when he reassured her again that everything
was okay, that he wanted to be alone. 

“I don’t know why she lied, Luke,” she
said softly before she left.  “Sometimes, when a person wants something so bad,
and doesn’t know how to get it…”

He lay looking out the window, thinking
about how much it hurt to lose a baby that had never existed.  How much more
must it hurt, to lose a baby you had seen, and fed and clothed, and held in
your arms?

He had several hours to think about what
he was going to say, and how he was going to say it.  The medication muddled
his mind, and he drifted to sleep, expecting to dream of babies, but dreaming
instead of dead trees that talked and the Space Needle, of all things.  When he
woke, Melinda was there, checking her lipstick in a tiny mirror.

He’d planned to hurt her, he realized as
soon as he saw her.  He’d intended to strike back and make her pay.

But when he saw her, all he felt was
pity.  She pulled back her lips to check her teeth, then snapped the mirror and
dropped it into her purse on the floor, then rose to wander the room, checking
to see who’d sent flowers and potted plants.

Luke watched her chew her thumbnail, look
at her watch, cataloging the many contrasts between her and Dusty.  Dusty had
watched him while she was there.  Still, and steady, and focused completely on
him.  Melinda looked at everything
except
him.

Melinda was a girl, and always would be. 
Dusty was a woman, and always had been.

He shifted and made enough noise to let
her know he was awake, and managed a smile when she turned.

“Hey you,” she said, coming over to the
bed.  “How are you feeling?”

“Not bad, all in all.  How about you?”

“I’m good,” she said, then put her hand on
her belly as if she’d just remembered.  “Oh.  You know.  A little queasy still. 
But that’s to be expected.  Mama said she was sick twenty-four hours a day with
me.”

They stared at each other in silence for a
moment, then she began to chew her thumb again and rattle on about the flowers
by his window.

Silence between them was never easy, the
way it was with him and Dusty.  She took a deep breath, and he recognized the
signs that she was about to launch into one of her ten-minute monologues about
nothing, just to fill the void.

He cut her off before she got started.

“I know you’re not pregnant, Melinda.”

Her eyes widened and she took a step back,
her expression telling him everything he needed to know.

It took her only a moment to recover, but
in that time any doubt he had was erased.

“What kind of drugs are you on, Luke
Tanner?  Of course I’m pregnant.  You should know, you took me to the doctor
yourself.”

He had fully intended to make her squirm. 
Instead, he took her hand in his.  “Why did you lie to me?”

She snatched her hand back.  “I didn’t
lie
,
Luke.  I’m pregnant.  With your baby.  Who told you I lied?  Who?  That trashy
bar crawler?”

Anger flared, and it must have been all
over his face, because she lifted her chin and set her lips, but didn’t go any
further down that road.

“I’m not playing this game with you,
Melinda.  I’m trained to read body language, you know.  I’ve suspected from the
beginning that you weren’t really pregnant, but you just gave yourself away
when I confronted you.”

Her face buckled, and she dropped down
into the chair beside his bed.  He knew tears weren’t far away.  “Luke,
please.  I
am
…”

“It’s going to be okay, Melinda.  You’ll
find somebody. You’re too pretty to have to resort to lying.”

Tears spilled over and ran down her
cheeks, and she snatched a handful of tissue from the box by his bed.  “Stop
calling me a liar.”

She was close enough that he could reach
out and rub her shoulder.  She began to cry in earnest now, bent over in the
chair, and he stroked her back and let her cry it out.

“You don’t know what it’s like.  There are
no men in this town.  Everyone is married and having babies.  Everyone except
me.  We were good together, you know we were.  We had fun, and everyone said we
made a cute couple.  I thought if I left for a while and gave you a chance to
miss me, you’d see how much you needed me.  But instead I come home to find
you’re already sniffing around that blonde witch.”

She wiped her nose and threw the wadded up
tissue in the wastebasket and reached for more.  “We would have been just fine
if she hadn’t come along.  Just fine.  But she showed up and Mama said she’d
never seen you look at anyone like you looked at her.  And I panicked.  I knew
I had to get you away from her any way I could.”

“How long were you going to carry out the
charade?”

“Just until we were married.  Hopefully
I’d get pregnant quick and you’d never have to know,” she said miserably.  “But
if not, I thought I would just say I had a miscarriage.”

And put him through that torture, too, he
thought. He’d seen Colt and Becca go through that particular hell, too many
times.

She looked up at him with shining
cornflower blue eyes, wide with anticipation, and licked her lips.

Involuntarily, Luke’s lip curled in
disgust.  Even now she was trying to play him.  He drew his hand back and met
her eyes stonily.

She shrugged slightly, as if to say ‘it
was worth a try’ and the hope went out of her eyes.

“Does your mother know you’re not really
pregnant?”  Was she going to let her own mother think she’d lost her
grandchild? 

“She figured it out, too.  I guess I’m not
a very good actress.  She warned this was just going to turn into a big mess. 
Is it going to turn into a big mess, Luke?”

It was messy enough for him now, but she
meant was he going to tell everyone she’d lied.  “That’s up to you.  You can
tell people whatever you want.  Say it was a false alarm.  I’ll go along with
whatever, as long as you don’t concoct some story about me beating you up and
making you lose the baby.  And as long as you stay away from Dusty.”

She frowned and stood, grabbing her purse
and another handful of tissues.  “Don’t worry, I’ll stay away from your
precious Dusty.  I’m going back to my sister’s.  I may even stay there.  There
are a lot more men in Dallas.”  She sniffed again and looked down at him, and
he wondered what he’d ever seen in her.  “Goodbye, Luke.  Good luck
with…everything.”

Dusty cursed herself, Luke Tanner, and
Wayne all the way to Tumbleweeds to drop off the supplies, where she cursed at
Rodney, and continued all the way back into town.  She did it again – although
under her breath this time – when she walked through the choir room door and
was greeted by a dozen middle-aged women equipped with all manner of devices to
commit audio torture.

            Louise was showing off her recorder when
Dusty came in.  She hadn’t picked up any musical ability between the grocery
store and the church, Dusty noted, but she had learned to blow from the
diaphragm.  It wasn’t exactly an improvement.

            Louise saw Dusty and hurried over.  “You
are a living, breathing doll to help us out like this.  We are here and raring
to go.”

            “I see that,” Dusty said as she looked
around the room.  Two women held trombones and seemed to be preparing to share
one mouthpiece between them.  Luke’s mother had a child size guitar with three
strings on it and a picture of David Cassidy painted on the face.  The woman
who worked at the convenience store had an old set of bells, and she’d brought
a tall fuzzy marching band hat with her, which she’d set on a chair waiting for
the right moment to put it on, Dusty supposed.  All together she counted those
instruments, the bass drum from the band director’s wife, an accordion and two
trumpets.  A baton leaned against the wall, and Dusty decided that if someone
decided to start twirling right here in the Baptist Church choir room, she was
packing her bags.

           
I ought to take this group up to Luke
Tanner’s hospital room
, she thought grimly as Sue Ellen Buchanan dropped a
cymbal on her foot. 
Let them play him a get-well tune
.

            The group quieted slowly and they all
turned to look at her.  She felt the weight of responsibility on her chest and
she nodded, fighting a moment of panic.

            “What do you want us to do first?” Louise
asked.  “We’ve picked out the four songs we want to learn.”

            Dusty chewed her lip to keep from cursing
again.  Four songs?!?  “That’s great.  I am really impressed by your commitment
and enthusiasm.  I really am.  But…”

            The group stared at her, eyebrows raised,
waiting for her to dampen their enthusiasm.  “But I’m afraid there is just no
way I’m going to be able to teach you to play instruments and learn four songs
before tonight.”

            “What?”  Louise took a step back, her
recorder to her heart.

            Oh come
on
, Dusty thought.  She
breathed deeply and took a stab at being tactful.  “It takes months, sometimes
years, to learn to play an instrument.  I know you all have more than the
average amount of musical talent – I could tell that from the choir rehearsal I
heard last week – so I know you’re not a group of amateurs.”  Boy, she thought,
tact turned into bull with little or no warning.  “And I would encourage you to
continue with your plan to form a band, to play at
next
year’s Rain
Fest.”