Daisies in the Canyon(9)

“Maybe,” she said. “Could be that she’d follow anyone around the ranch, not just me. Maybe she’s lonely since Ezra died.”

He rose and nodded. “I imagine so. He did love his dogs. You said that ranchin’ isn’t easy. How do you know that? Weren’t you in the army for the last decade? How would you know anything about how hard ranchin’ is? Or about life on the outside anyway?”

“Yes, I was in the army. The rest is need to know.”

Cooper chuckled. “Well, maybe someday I’ll get upgraded to that level of classification, Sergeant Malloy. Looks like you’ve got a bodyguard there whether you want one or not.”

“She wanted inside the cemetery, so I opened the gate. I expect she’ll go on back home now,” Abby said.

His arm grazed hers as he headed toward the tent pole, and there it was again. Sparks. Sizzle. Steam. It was a wonder that it didn’t create a warm fog right there beside Ezra’s grave.

He retracted the pole until it was only about four feet long and headed out of the cemetery. She looked for a truck, berating herself for letting anyone sneak up on her like that. In the war zone, it could have meant instant death. His whistling grew fainter as he disappeared behind a herd of cattle. So he liked to walk, too, did he? But wait, how did he know she was a sergeant? She looked at the patches on the sleeve of her jacket, smiled, and put the ski mask back on. If he knew that much about the army, maybe someday he would get his classification moved up a notch.

When she finished her walk, with the dog right beside her the whole way, she sat down on the porch for a few minutes but the cold began to seep in so she went on inside the house. Shiloh was in the living room, curled up on the sofa with a thick romance book in her hands. The cover picture was a half-naked cowboy, and although Abby shared her taste in books, her half sister was crazy as bat shit if she thought she could learn about ranching by reading about hunky cowboys.

Abby made a trip through the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and took out the chicken and potato salad. It wasn’t really suppertime but she’d worked up an appetite with her long walk around the ranch. She rolled off two paper towels and tucked them into her jacket pocket, picked up a paper plate, and loaded it with cold fried chicken, coleslaw, and potato salad, leaving one section empty for a piece of the chocolate cake. She stuck a plastic fork in her jacket pocket and carried all of it to her room, where she set it on the nightstand beside the bed, then pulled off her jacket and hung it in the closet.

Then she sat down in the worn harvest-gold recliner facing the window and unlaced her boots. When her toes were freed from socks and boots alike, she padded barefoot to the bathroom right next door to her room. The female soldiers she’d shared a bathroom with in her last duty post in Kuwait would have fought the war with nothing more than their bare hands to get a chance to soak in a deep, claw-footed tub like that. The shower was basic, with a white plastic curtain keeping the water off the linoleum floor. The toilet had crazed marks on the water tank, but it was clean. What had started off as a wall-hung sink now had a crude cabinet built around it: no doors, just shelving holding towels and extra rolls of toilet paper. It might not be five-star-hotel quality, but it sure as hell beat the showers in the army barracks. And the towels under the counter were big, thick, and fluffy. Evidently, Ezra had liked a few luxuries.

Abby could make do with sharing with the other two. On her way back to her room, she caught the strains of country music coming from the bedroom across the hallway. So Bonnie liked country music, did she?

She leaned against the doorjamb into her room for a minute and recognized Miranda Lambert’s voice as she and the Pistol Annies sang “Hell on Heels.” That particular CD had kept Abby awake on the long trip from South Texas. The next song, “Lemon Drop,” was one of Abby’s favorites. The lyrics said that her life was like a lemon drop and that she was sucking on the bitter to get to the sweet.

That’s the way she felt as she went into her room and realized in that moment she was going to unpack everything and wait until spring, when the daisies bloomed, to make a definite decision about leaving. She’d take a few months of the bitter to find out if there was a sweet middle in the lemon drop.

“Well, shit!” she exclaimed when she shut the door and remembered that she had a half bath all of her own. She went to the door and opened it to be sure she hadn’t imagined Rusty telling her that Ezra’s room came with her own private bathroom.

One of those old metal medicine cabinets with a mirror door had been hung above the sink to the left. The toilet sat right beside it with only enough room for a toilet paper hanger between it and the wall. A tall man’s knees would have hit the other wall, but she wasn’t tall, so it was fine. And it was hers and she didn’t have to share it with the other two.

She settled into the recliner and took a deep breath. The faint scent of cigarettes still lingered in the velvet, reminding her of her mother. Martha was a pack-a-day smoker right up until she died, although she never smoked in the house or the doughnut shop. But hugs with a little smoke smell in them always reminded her of her mother’s love and care.

She’d learned to eat fast, often on the run, and sometimes not even finishing what she did have before her, but that evening she forced herself to eat slowly as she looked out the window toward the south. If the gray clouds hadn’t covered the sun, she could have seen it setting.