The Lost Husband (10 page)

“How did you two meet?” I asked.

“In high school,” Jean said.

“I proposed to her in high school,” Russ pointed out.

“You guys dated in high school?”

“We went on a few dates,” Jean corrected. “Dating was different back then.”

“Mostly I just followed her around,” Russ said. “Begging her to marry me.”

“You did do that, didn’t you?” Jean said, regarding him.

“She always gave me butterflies,” Russ went on. “Even long after she’d found Frank, and long after I was married myself. Anytime I saw her around town, I’d have to just plant my feet and take a deep breath.”

Jean looked over. “Is that true?”

Russ nodded and examined his beer bottle. “I just never could quite put out that spark.”

Jean put her hand on top of his.

After a moment I turned back to Russ. “Tell me about your tattoo,” I said.

“Darlin’,” he said, snapping to attention, “don’t you recognize her? That’s your aunt Jean.”

I tried to decide if he was teasing.

Russ shrugged. “She dared me.”

“You guys seem like a great pair,” I said.

“Well,” Jean said, “I’m a hippie liberal, and he’s a neoconservative nut job, but we make it work.”

Russ nodded. “We do our part for the unity of the country.” Then, to clarify, he said, “I’m really just a Republican. Jean just likes the way ‘nut job’ sounds.”

“It has a certain ring to it,” I said.

Soon the conversation veered off to farm topics, and I relaxed into the pleasant atmosphere of food and conversation—until
Sunshine popped her head up from under the table and said, “But have y’all heard about the panther?”

We all turned and stared.

Sunshine scrabbled back up to her chair. “There’s a black panther prowling the spring at night.”

“Prowling the spring?” I asked.

“Prowling the whole town, actually,” Sunshine said. “It’s front-page news at the feed store.”

“Sunny,” Russ said gently, “there aren’t any black panthers in Texas. It’s just not possible.”

“Actually,” O’Connor said, “there
are
mountain lions in Texas. Mostly up near Big Bend, though.” He gave Sunshine a nod. “It’s possible, at least.”

“I like the idea,” Jean said. “Who were we to run every majestic living thing out of the state? I don’t think I’d want to live in a world stripped of every wild creature but squirrels and cockroaches.”

“You won’t like the idea so much if he gets one of your goats,” Russ said.

I sat very still. An image of my two sweet children tending the garden as an enormous black beast sprinted out toward them from the forest took over my brain. Never mind the question of why they would be gardening at night.

I stood up, pushing my chair back with a honk, and announced in a non sequitur, “Time for bed!”

The kids, who were not yet aware that their lives were in peril, emerged from under the table and asked to go swing on the tires.

“Not a chance!” I said, as if they’d just asked to go play with shotguns.

“Five more minutes?” Abby, the expert bargainer, asked.

“Nope!”

I herded them both up the stairs, ignoring their protests—cries
of injustice that didn’t fade until they’d submerged their little bodies in the steaming bath, where they remembered that even though the underside of the table was pretty good, a hot bathtub was even better.

Six weeks of farm life had worked at least one miracle for me: My children ran themselves so ragged during the day that they had begun, for the first time in their lives, to actually fall asleep at bedtime. Which was lucky for me, because I was tuckered out myself. Usually I tiptoed back down, helped Jean with the last of the kitchen cleanup, and staggered off to my own bed. Some nights I even fell asleep in my overalls and woke up the next day with buckle prints across my collarbone.

Even so, it was satisfying to end the day completely spent. I got up when Dubbie announced it was morning, and I, like the kids, went to sleep as soon as I was horizontal in my bed. Or possibly even, some nights, several seconds before.

Jean had promised that my body would adjust and that pretty soon I’d be staying up to play Scrabble with her. But I couldn’t imagine it. It was easy now to see how she lived without a TV. She didn’t need one.

The kids were asleep before I’d even closed their door, and as I shuffled back down the stairs I felt the familiar tiredness in my thighs and shoulders and back that kicked in at about this time. I figured I’d just give Jean a hug good night, but when I saw the group all still sitting around the kitchen table, twinkle lights from the porch shining through the window glass, I felt what I wanted start to shift. The scene was as appealing as a campfire, and even though my body wanted to go to bed, my soul wanted to stay right there.

I eased back into my place at the table. Sunshine was doing palm readings.

“Great news,” Jean said when she saw me. “I’m headed for a long life of great wealth.” After many kebabs and about the same number of beers, everybody was relaxed, and Jean’s announcement brought a gust of laughter.

“My turn,” Russ said, laying down his big paws.

Sunshine took his right hand and studied it.

“Well,” she said after a good look, “you’re never going to have much money.”

“Money’s for people who lack imagination,” he said.

“And you’ll never be famous,” Sunshine went on, “or even respected by your peers.” I could see her stifling a smile. “But,” she went on, “the love in your life will outmatch the sorrow.”

“That’s just about the best fortune I could hope for,” Russ said.

Then he pulled Jean over and gave her a kiss right on the lips, one that lasted a little longer than anyone expected. We all politely looked around, and that’s when, for the first time since dinner started, my gaze fluttered toward O’Connor. Our eyes met and then flicked away—but in that moment I noticed something about him. He was playing with something on a chain around his neck. Something that shone a little.

I snuck another look, and then I knew what it was. A wedding ring.

I caught my breath so fast that I made myself cough. A wedding ring? On a chain? Did that mean O’Connor was married? I had just spent six weeks with him, and it had never even occurred to me that he might have—or have had—a wife. Nothing about him said “married.” My eyes sidled over to the choppy beard, the scraggly hair, and the plaid shirt with the goat-chewed sleeve. He couldn’t be married. Wives didn’t let their husbands walk around like that.

There it was, though: a smooth gold man’s band. Had it been
there, just out of sight, this whole time? Why wasn’t it on his finger?

Maybe that’s what goat farmers did. Maybe people who worked with their hands wore their rings in less busy places. There was no denying it was a wedding ring. And there was no denying this, either: If a man has a wedding ring, the chances that he’s married just have to go up.

Right on the heels of that realization came another one: I didn’t want him to be married. Somehow—despite the beard and the teasing and the endless renditions of Kenny Loggins’s greatest hits—I’d managed to develop a tickle of a feeling about him that I suddenly realized was the beginning of a crush.

It felt pathetic to even admit it inside my own head. A crush on a totally disinterested, chronically unkempt, and now most likely married man. Trouble was, there was no going back now. You can’t unrealize a thing. And once it was out there, even just in my mind, I felt my face flush, and I had to look down at my empty plate.

But why? Why him? Was it just loneliness? Desperation? He certainly wasn’t encouraging me. And it wasn’t his looks—I couldn’t even imagine what he looked like under all that fur. Maybe it was that he’d been so kind to the kids, letting Tank “help” him hammer things, and teaching Abby martial arts moves: fatherly skills they would never get from me. He’d taught them how to whistle with a blade of grass between their thumbs and how to find the Big Dipper. Not to mention the afternoon I’d found them all in the barn, kids laughing like crazy with their mouths wide open as O’Connor tried to squirt them from across the room—with milk straight from the goat.

He was kind to me, too, in his way. He’d laughed it off the time I left the freezer door open. And the time I dropped a bucket and
spilled a morning’s worth of milk. He hummed too much, but I liked that as well—I liked the way his voice was a little sandpapery. And while he let me do most of the talking, he never made me feel self-conscious about it. Most of the time, if I looked over, I’d see his eyes crinkled up in a smile.

Was all that worthy of a crush? I couldn’t help but compare him to Danny, and there he failed miserably. Danny had been articulate, well groomed, successful—even if not a great investor—and an all-around catch. This guy was none of those things. It forced me to think about how far my life had fallen: that this practically homeless-looking man was the best I had to wrap my heart around.

I took a deep breath. I needed to be alone. I was just about to stand up when two warm hands wrapped themselves around mine, and I looked down to see they were Sunshine’s.

“Your turn,” she said.

I was too queasy with realizations to protest. She took my left hand, which, of course, had a wedding ring of its own, and spread it palm up on the table. I had no interest in Sunshine reading my palm, and if my mind hadn’t been elsewhere I might have pulled my hand politely away. But I didn’t.

She was dead serious as she read the lines. “Your past and your future are about to intersect. You’re about to learn firsthand how joy is impossible without sadness. You can go forward or back, but you can’t do both. And everything is about to change.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Also?” she said.

I waited.

“Nothing is ever really lost.”

She wanted those words to have an impact on me. They didn’t. They were just words. Words that sounded, honestly, pretty hokey.

“True,” I said at last, nodding, and I hoped I didn’t sound sarcastic. This was fortune-telling? If I’d been paying for it, I’d want my money back.

Now I knew for sure that Sunshine’s whole paranormal thing was just a ploy for attention. Weren’t we all hanging on her every word? Weren’t we all captivated? It wasn’t the cover of
Maxim
or anything, but it had to be better than no attention at all.

“It’s all true,” I said. “Thank you.”

Sunshine was already turning toward O’Connor. “Now you.”

O’Connor stood straight up. “Nope,” he said. “No fortunes for me.”

“But it’s your turn.”

“You know what, Sunny? I’ve got to get home.”

Russ was still jolly. “Don’t you want to hear about how you’re going to get fat and lose your hair?”

“Not tonight,” O’Connor said. He gave Jean a kiss on the cheek and said, “Thanks for the kebabs,” as he opened the door and glanced back. “ ’Night, Russ. ’Night, Sunny. ’Night …”

Where my name should have fallen easily into the lineup, there was nothing. His eyes met mine, and I saw a little flash of surprise in them. He’d forgotten my name. Six weeks together in the barn, and he hadn’t even registered my name.

“Libby,” I finished for him, in what I hoped was a tone of bored irritation.

“Libby,” he repeated, softer, with a little nod.

Then, as he turned, everybody called back, “Good night!”

That is, everybody but me. Because, really, if he didn’t even know my name, I could easily save my good nights for somebody else.

Chapter 8
 

That was well into February. By then I could run the milking machine and find the circuit breaker when the power got overloaded. I knew where all the clean pots and pans went, and I could find just about anything in the cheese kitchen without having to look. I even knew most of the goats’ names, though I did still get Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony mixed up. I now had my own pair of Crocs inside the kitchen doorway—powder blue—and I was, as Jean had predicted, truly living in my roomy, durable, and super-comfy overalls. I’d try to think back to all those mornings at my mother’s, wrestling my body into pantyhose and then wedging my feet into heels, and it seemed like another lifetime. Somebody else’s other lifetime.

The kids were settled in, too. Tank had ripped every single pair of pants he had, and Jean had darned them with patches from her vintage feed-sack collection. I’d given him a buzz cut out on the front porch one not-as-chilly afternoon, and then, after
he lost his first tooth, he looked exactly like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Abby, too, grew more charming by the day. Her little legs suddenly stretched out long and birdlike in her favorite purple leggings. Jean had sewn her a ruffly white pinafore so she could play
Little House on the Prairie
, and she wore it over everything—even her nightgown sometimes. Abby had never been a fan of having her hair brushed, but since moving in with Jean, she’d changed her mind, and now she let Jean braid it every morning before school.

School seemed to be going okay. Tank was happy, in that sweet way he had of being happy anywhere. I worried more about Abby, and I constantly second-guessed the decision I’d made not to tell her teacher about the car accident. On one hand, if the teacher knew about her bad leg, she might be able to help her and keep an eye out for her. On the other hand, once the teacher knew, all the teachers would know, and our sad story would travel through this school as it had through others. And then Abby would become the Girl Who’d Been Injured, and it would be official. Her title. The thing everyone knew about her before they knew anything else.