“I bet after traveling all over the place, Dell City seems pretty small to you, doesn’t it?” he asked.
Rosalie’s truck was parked in front of the Catholic church again. She must have done something terrible in her past to need to go to confession that often.
“Well?” Jackson asked.
“I’m sorry. I saw Rosalie’s truck, and my mind went in circles,” I replied. “I only lived in a house for a little while after my mama died, and then less than six months after Frank remarried. And yes, this place does seem small. If you gathered up all the people in town, you wouldn’t have a third of what I’ve seen in a Vegas casino. Haveyouever lived in a town this small?”
“Not really, but I’ve been in lots of communities in other countries that had fewer houses than this place,” he answered.
We’d gone a couple of miles when I saw lights up ahead of us. “Is that the site?”
“Yes, it is, and the first place we plan to drill,” he told me. “There will be others if this one turns out to be as profitable as Henry thinks it will be.”
“Do you really think you’ll be happy here?” I asked.
He hesitated while he parked in front of one of several mobile trailers. “Let’s go inside where it’s warm. I’ve got beer and sweet tea in the fridge, and I can make hot tea or coffee.”
I opened the truck door, still without an answer to my question, and headed for a boxy-looking mobile trailer with no lights shining out the windows. “Why do you have so many of these homes out here?”Maybe that could get him talking.
Jackson used his long stride to get ahead so he could open the door for me. “The major crew members share four of them. They have all been working for the company for years and are pretty senior in the business. They each have different days off so that they aren’t all gone at the same time. The head honcho out here is Henry, our oil engineer, and he has a trailer of his own. He’s been with Dad’s company since I was a toddler. Aside from that, we need extra people on the site to prevent vandalism.”
I thought about some of the places ol’ Frank and I had stayed in the days when we weren’t flush. We always took everything in from the van on those nights and hoped that it hadn’t been stripped of its tires the next morning. I didn’t like to remember those times, but the life of a poker player was not all rainbows and unicorn farts—another of ol’ Frank’s sayings.
“And I’m not sure about being happy, but I’m going to give it a try,” he went on to say. “The Good Book says something about being content with our lot. I didn’t ever realize what a big order that was until recently.”
Amen to that,I thought.
The place was even smaller than Ada Lou’s travel trailer. A makeshift desk with two folding chairs were to my right. A sofa took up most of the room at the other end.
“Take off your coat and have a seat. The sofa is a lot more comfortable than one of those hard chairs. Want a beer or—”
“I would love one.” I made a mental note to use a breath mint before I went home. It wouldn’t do for Rosalie to smell any kind of alcohol on me. The very idea of her getting so mad that she walked away from the Tumbleweed came close to stopping my heart. I didn’t cook, and Rosalie seemed to be the core of the whole café.
He removed two bottles of beer from the tiny dorm-sized fridge and twisted the tops off each of them. Then he took a couple of steps, handed one to me, and sat down on the other end of the sofa.
I took a long drink of beer. “If you are thirty-eight and Henry has been around since you were a toddler, isn’t he about ready for retirement?”
“He doesn’t have family other than me and says he would die of boredom if he didn’t have new wells to drill.”
“Did he teach you all this stuff?” I waved a hand around to include everything.
“I don’t know everything yet, but Henry is giving it his best shot,” Jackson chuckled. “I hung around him enough as a child that I at leastlearned the lingo, and then the army trained me in that area since they were putting me together with a team that would spend time in places where ...” He paused.
“You could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me,” I said. “And then you would forever more remain at number three on my list.”
Jackson rolled his eyes. “That just might killme.”
“I figured as much. You learned the basics from Henry and some stuff in the army, and now Henry is teaching you whatever he knows that has to do with all those maps on the walls and those big books stacked up on the desk. And that is why you have to take stuff home with you at night. Right?”
He tipped up his bottle and downed a fourth of it. “Absolutely correct. Now, let’s talk about you and how I can move up to number one.”
Was that a pickup line? Or did he really mean it? I could flirt right back if it was the former, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it if it was the latter.
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Do you really think you’ll be happy doing this for the rest of your life?”
Jackson’s expression told me that he was thinking hard about his answer. Finally, he said, “I don’t know, Carla. Do you think you would be happy without poker games for the rest of your life?”
“If I had to answer that right now, I’d say no—but in a few months, I might change my mind.” I was surprised at my own answer. “What about you?”
