Jack's Heart, page 17
Jack tossed the muddy rubber boots in the back of his truck. His jeans showed generous swipes of mud above where they’d been. He could have used all-weather bib overalls like the fishermen wore in Gloucester.
“I’m sorry, Matty,” she said. “I didn’t think about that. We shouldn’t have come out—”
“Of course we should have. We had no way of knowing we were going to be needed to rescue a steer. Oh, wait. I have an idea,” Matty said with unconvincing innocence. “Jack, why don’t you take Val back to the Flying W to change for dinner, then bring her to the Slash-C. I’ll take the kids back, get some supper into them so they aren’t raving hungry when we’re all trying to eat.”
“I could take—”
“That’s not nece—”
Matty waved off both protests with one hand. “No, you can’t take the kids, Jack, because the car seats are in my truck. No way on this earth are we transferring the car seats after the trouble we had getting those things in right. But there’s also no way I’m letting you drive my baby after you waded into that muck hole. And, Val, yes it is necessary, because I don’t want to be rude, but you appear to have stepped in something. I might let you get in my truck if you took your shoe off and wrapped it in an old blanket and left it in the bed, but I really don’t want to sit through dinner with you like that. And your foot would get cold.”
She’d been backing toward the driver’s side of the truck as she talked, and now she called in reinforcements.
“What do you think, Addie, you want to come have some supper with Brennan? Then your mom will come over later, okay?”
“Yeah,” the kids chorused.
“Good. So let’s check that you two are still buckled up right. You want to get Addie settled before you go, Val?”
“Matty—”
Jack grumbled, “Give it up. I’ll wait for you in the truck.” He turned and headed away.
For a couple breaths, Val stayed where she was, then headed to the passenger side of Matty’s truck.
“Matty,” she started as she checked Addie’s belt. “Pushing him is not going to work. I don’t want—”
“Oh, go on. It’s just a ride. He won’t bite,” Matty said.
He might. She fought down a shiver.
“Jack won’t bite,” Addie proclaimed.
“No,” agreed Brennan. “Jack won’t bite Addie’s mom.”
The two women’s gazes met across the back seat, sharing the instant of dismayed amusement that their children had followed the conversation that well.
“Bed bugs bite,” Addie solemnly informed her friend. “Have to tell them No! before you go to sleep.”
Jack looked at her as she climbed into the truck with a faint lifting of his brows.
She explained her grin by relaying Addie’s advice to Brennan, leaving out any hint of what led up to the discussion of biting.
*
During the rest of the drive back to the Flying W home ranch, she asked a couple questions about where they were and what she saw.
He answered in a minimum number of words.
Between every word either of them spoke were the ones she was certain they were both still hearing.
You said it was you and me. And that everything was going to be okay. Now I’m saying that to you, Jack Ralston. It’s you and me. And everything will be okay. Tell me. So you’re not carrying it alone anymore.
I carry it alone.
As they crested a ridge, the buildings of the home ranch came into sight, with the foreman’s cottage not far from a cluster of barns and other outbuildings, with the main house beyond them, facing the highway.
They also saw the worn ranch truck coming toward them. Bryan waved out the driver’s window and both vehicles slowed, coming abreast and stopping at the edge of the big corral behind the barn.
“Where you headed?” Jack asked.
“Out to repair that fence in the Gray Wolf pasture while there’s light.”
Jack nodded. “Check the Three Rocks section, too, if you have time. Couple of steers in the mud the other side. Make sure they’re not getting through there.”
“Will do. And with those things done…”
“Yeah, if those are done, you can leave early Friday.”
Bryan grinned. Looking past Jack, he said to her, “Group of friends from school are getting together for the weekend over in Cody.”
She smiled back. “If I don’t see you, have a great time.”
“Oh, I will.” Jack’s truck started easing forward. “Wait. Almost forgot. A friend of yours is here, Val. At the foreman’s house.”
“A friend of mine?”
“Yup. Left ’em on the porch.”
As he Jack his truck roll on, he asked without looking at her, “You expecting somebody?”
“No.” Catching the narrowing of his eyes, she downplayed her surprise to add, “Isn’t it delightful that a friend has come to give me a great surprise?”
He didn’t even bother to grunt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In a moment, he pulled up near the front of the foreman’s house. She caught movement in the shadow under the porch roof, but had no hope of recognizing anyone.
El. It had to be. Nobody but her cousin would fret enough about her to trek out here, and she had told El … well, enough to make her fret. But only because Eleanor Thatcher McRae had a very low fret threshold. Still, this was the busiest time of year for the Inn. She wouldn’t have left Cahill on his own with Sam, would she?
Unless — Oh, God, it couldn’t be her mother. Surely, Bryan would have said her mother was here to see her, not a friend. And would Lucy Trimarco have been pulled away from Gloucester with her other kids and grandchildren at hand? Val never would have thought so. More than once in her life, she’d counted on that to keep her mother from descending on her.
All that went through her mind as she rounded the front of the truck, aware of Jack’s eyes on her through the front windshield.
A plump woman rose from the rocking chair on the front porch. Val tried to keep her face neutral, her pace steady.
The driver’s door of the truck swung open, and Jack got out.
Apparently, her face and pace hadn’t been neutral or steady enough.
She tried to get ahead of him, but he was right there beside her as she reached the steps.
“Hello,” she said, hoping her smile masked her confusion.
The woman clasped one hand over the other atop her heart. “Oh my, I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe I’m actually standing here with you. Valerie Prudence Trimarco.”
“Yeah. Uh, pretty surprising.”
Jack came up another step toward the woman, and Val didn’t think it was an accident that his head was now slightly above the woman’s. “You’re a friend of Valerie’s?” He shaved the edge of hostile while landing dead-center in suspicious.
“Jack—”
“Oh, dear, I know it was presumptuous of me to say so to that young man — so good-looking, and a real cowboy — but I do feel like I know you, and you have been such a good friend to me. I’ve watched you almost from the beginning—”
“On the Internet,” Jack said in deep disapproval. Val felt rather than saw that he had sent her a dark, significant look. She kept her eyes on the stranger — no. That was Jack’s view. That anyone he didn’t already know was a stranger — a suspicious stranger. This was a woman. A viewer. A potential friend.
“On ‘Mommy: The Truth Zone,’ ” the woman said almost reverently. “I can tell you, there were days and days and days when only ‘Mommy: The Truth Zone’ kept me sane. I can’t thank you enough.”
As the woman wiped at tears, Val advanced up to the step Jack stood on, though that still left him looming over her, so she had to look up when she shot him a look of See. My blog does good.
Val took one of the woman’s damp hands and pressed it. “Thank you for saying that. It’s so wonderful to hear. We all need some help staying sane sometimes.”
Jack muttered something. Val didn’t need to hear the words to get the gist.
“I never dreamed in a million years that I’d ever get to meet you. Not with you living way back East in Massachusetts. But when you came out here, I knew I had to come see you.”
“But I never said anything more than Wyoming.”
“Oh, you didn’t need to. I saw the mountains in the background and that got me close. Then one picture had the truck in the background, really small, but eventually I made out the name of a ranch, and the people there told me where to find you.”
Each detail the woman gave felt like a hammer blow on Val’s head, pounding her deeper and deeper into a hole. Jack’s stare followed her down.
But the woman’s happiness never dimmed. “And of course you—” She beamed at Jack. “—must be the reason.”
“What? No. No, he’s not the reason. I mean, not really. Just—” Just wanted to thank him for delivering my daughter. She couldn’t say that. She’d promised him. Not only that, but a finger of uneasiness poked at her at that moment, because she suddenly felt grateful that her daughter wasn’t here. That this woman — okay, damn it, this stranger — wouldn’t see Addie.
“What makes you think that?” Jack demanded of the woman.
She didn’t seem to take his interrogation tone amiss. “I recognized you.”
“You recogni—”
“You couldn’t have,” Val protested, appalled. “He’s never been on the blog. I never mentioned him or had a picture—”
“Oh, yes, the picture with the shadow.” She beamed up at Jack. “Your shadow.”
Jack went still an instant, then shifted his eyes to Val. He had her pinned with his gaze, with its accusation, with its shout of I-told-you-so.
“I recognized the hat as soon as you got out of the truck because it’s just like the shadow. Oh!”
The woman’s exclamation, followed by a giggle finally let Val break Jack’s look. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s … I’m so silly.” Her eyes filled with tears. “The good-looking young cowboy who greeted me and had me sit here to wait for you was wearing the same kind of hat. So, I suppose it could have been him?”
Relief and triumph flowed through Val, welled around her, lifting her right out of that hole. She shot Jack a look to be sure he’d heard. He had.
“It certainly could have been,” she said to the woman. “Hard to tell one cowboy hat from another.”
“Especially from just a shadow like that,” the woman said, apparently back on the edge of giggling. The woman’s moods certainly came and went quickly.
“Exactly.” Val beamed at her new best friend.
The other woman blinked at her, then gave a kind of hiccupping sigh. “This is so wonderful. Amazing. Being here chatting with you like this. Meeting you — Oh!”
She jumped at the woman’s exclamation. “What?”
“I’ve never told you my name. Where is my head, not to mention my manners? I’m Angi, Angi Pilson.” She extended her hand.
Val shook. “It’s good to meet you, Angi.”
“Oh, it’s so good to meet you. So good and such an honor. A true honor. It makes it all worthwhile.”
“All what worthwhile?” Jack demanded.
“The drive and all.”
“I know. You have to drive far to get almost anywhere in Wyoming, don’t you,” Val said. If she kept talking, Jack couldn’t ask his demanding questions. Clearly, she was simply a devoted fan. One with perhaps a little too much time on her hands, which had allowed her to put together the few teeny-tiny hints Val had let drop. “The distances out here amaze me. Where’d you drive from?”
“Baxter.”
“Sorry, I don’t know that town. Just Knighton and Jefferson.”
“It’s near Brainerd. It’s a real nice town. And the people are good people. But you know how it is when you’re new in town and most everyone else has lived there forever, and they have all their friends from the time they were in diapers, not to mention their families, so their lives are so full that it’s natural they don’t have time for newcomers.”
Val was so struck by the woman’s words that she waited a beat too long. Her “That must be so hard” was run over by Jack’s “Where’s Brainerd?”
“About the very middle of Minnesota.”
“Minnesota?” Val repeated. “Baxter’s not in Wyoming?”
But Jack’s “Minnesota?” had a lot more impact. Especially when he followed up with, “You drove here from Minnesota? How many hours?”
Angi Pilson pulled in her bottom lip. “About fourteen, but that was with a few stops.”
“Fourteen. That’s, uh, that’s a long drive.” Val couldn’t stop herself from looking at Jack again. Not in triumph this time. He was intent on the woman.
“Long drive,” he said, “even with sharing the driving.”
“Oh, I drove alone. Regina gets car sick, so I it would have been cruel to bring her, and it wouldn’t have been fair to bring Petra and not bring Regina.”
“You left your kids at home?” There was a slight rawness in Jack’s voice.
“Yes. Got up before dawn so everyone was still sleeping. Then I wrote the note to Tim, and told him he’d finally have to take a couple of the vacation days he’s been piling up like a miser and look after the kids himself. I left him lists of the girls’ schedules and what they should wear each day and when to wash their hair. And the baby will be fine. I pumped enough to leave a week’s supply of milk in the freezer. And that was no easy task because that boy’s a good feeder, that one. Brought the pumps, sterile bags, cold packs, and a cooler with me, of course.”
Jack’s usually stoic face held the usual male expression of dazed disbelief when the topic turned to breastfeeding.
Val nearly sagged with relief. Jack Ralston was contagious, and she’d momentarily caught a dose of his worst-case scenario bug. But a woman who made sure to have a week’s worth of breast milk before leaving on a trip was definitely looking out for her child. She straightened abruptly. A week?
“A week’s a long time to be away from your husband—” That drew no response. “—and kids.”
A fresh spurt of tears appeared. “I might not make it the whole week. But that’s what I told Tim. So he didn’t think he could just let things slide a day or two and I’d be back to clean up.”
Jack appeared to have recovered from the discussion of breastfeeding, because he was slipping his phone from his pocket while still listening closely.
“So your husband, uh, Tim knew you wanted to come here?”
“Him? No way. He’d have to listen to me to know that. I wrote in the note that I needed to do something for myself. Then, like I said, I gave him the schedules and instructions and such,”
“The note?”
“Uh-huh. The note I left when I dropped the baby off at his work before I started driving yesterday.”
“Don’t you think you should call him? Let him know where you are — Okay, maybe not that.” Val shifted approach as Angi vehemently shook her head. “But let him know you’re okay. And be sure the kids are okay.”
“Maybe.”
“And you’ll need to find a place to stay, to get some rest before you start the long trip back.”
“Oh, that’s so kind of you to invite me to stay—”
“I didn’t mean—”
“No.”
This time Val didn’t mind having her words overridden by Jack’s strong voice.
“No room,” he added in a tone that didn’t invite discussion. “Nearest motel’s an hour away. I’ll call now. Make sure there’s a room. And get you headed out before it’s dark.” He retreated down the stairs, but didn’t stop watching the woman and her.
“Oh, I can’t spend money on a motel. I brought just enough for gas. And that’s money I’ve saved from using the coupons Tim’s always making fun of. Talks about how important it is we save, but then he laughs when I do. So I don’t tell him. I just put it aside. He’s not interested, so he doesn’t need to know.”
“What about food? You have to have some money for food, right?” Val asked. Mostly from curiosity, but it did also cover that Jack’s call — supposedly to the motel — only consisted of three numbers.
“No, no, I packed the cooler. As I eat the food, there’s more room for the breastmilk. I planned it so it’ll all balance out.” Angi began detailing what she’d packed and how she’d estimated how much room she would need for each stage of her trip.
During this, Jack was talking to someone in a low voice, though she’d caught the phrase “we’ve got this woman at the Flying W” and something about driving from Minnesota.
His head came up now, and he looked intently down the road toward the highway. She turned her head that way, too, and saw dust clouds rising as vehicles turned off the highway and headed toward them.
“They’re here,” Jack said into the phone. “Yeah.”
He hung up, turned, and gave her a long, steady look.
Message received. This could be the dicey part.
She’d recognized that the trucks were from the sheriff’s department. To get here so fast someone must have called earlier. Angi had said she stopped at the Slash-C. Someone there?
Angi Pilson didn’t seem to notice, focused on wrapping up her inventory. “…and of course mustard for the bologna. But that doesn’t take up much space. And keeping it fuller keeps everything cooler.”
“I’ve heard that,” Val said with a nod. But at least three-quarters of her attention was on the trucks pulling up in front of the porch.
“Oh, dear. You’re not in trouble with the law, are you?”
Angi sounded so disapproving that Val bit the inside of her cheeks to keep from laughing.
“Are we—?” Jack started. After the barest glimpse of the affront clear in his posture, she looked away or she’d risk losing it completely.
“No, no,” Val assured Angi hurriedly. “Jack and I have a social engagement this evening and we didn’t want to leave you without providing some assistance for getting settled tonight. You know there’s so little crime out here, the sheriff’s department helps with situations like this all the time.”
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