“Must have been a hard day.” Jillian stood with Blake’s arm around her waist.
For a second, Alice thought her daughter was being cute, but then she realized there was no teasing in the voice.
“You didn’t hear?” Rachel looked around the crowded kitchen. “How did you not hear?”
“Hear what?” Standing by the double oven, Sarah Sue stopped transferring fresh rolls onto a plate, playfully smacking Preston’s hand when he reached for one.
The smile they shared was almost enough to make Alice forget her miserable day. Returning her attention to the salad bowl, she let out a slow breath. Apparently, the Sweet Ranch grapevine was not living up to its usual speed of communication.
“Mom lost her pants in the field,” Preston spoke, stone-faced.
“What?” Jillian spun around to stare at her mother. “How the heck does one lose their pants?”
“Not hard if you’ve had enough tequila,” Rachel quipped.
Her mother and her sister’s heads whipped around to glare at her.
Rachel raised her hand, palm open. “Hey, haven’t you ever heard the song? ‘Tequila Makes her Clothes Fall Off’?”
“I was not drunk.” Stone-faced herself, Alice picked up the bowl and took a step toward the dining room. “I had a disagreement with an auger.”
“An auger?” Jillian’s voice rose several octaves. Jess and Cassie’s concern echoed hers.
Sarah Sue sprang from the table where she’d sat down, reaching her mother-in-law in seconds. “Are you hurt? Let me see.” She studied Alice from head to toe and was about to squat to check Alice’s legs when Alice took a step back.
“I’m fine. It’s my pants that didn’t survive.”
“Bet the cows enjoyed the show,” Carson teased.
Preston looked to his brother. “I had no idea how good Mom would look wrapped in a windbreaker.”
Biting down on her back teeth, Alice knew she had this coming, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Somewhere inthe handbook of life it had to say one must never make fun of one’s mother. It had to.
“When I got to the field with clean—straight leg—jeans, she was hiding in the car while Clint dug posts.”
“Clint saw you without pants?” Jillian’s eyes were wide as saucers.
“No, Clint did not see me without pants.” Alice’s response sounded too much like a whiny child for her own ears. “I had already wrapped myself in what was left of my jeans by the time he found me. Then he gave me his jacket for an easier cover up.”
Now that she thought about it, Clint had been much more of a gentleman about all this than her own sons. At least when he sat down laughing, she knew he wasn’t laughing at her so much as at the situation. And she suspected, there was a hint of nervous relief. Even she knew she could have been horribly injured, losing a limb or two and not just a pair of jeans. That guy had proven himself over and over with this family. From the day he showed up in her kitchen to inform her that something was terribly wrong and the hands had all left, to the day she got tossed onto the barbed wire, to today and everything in between.
“On the bright side,” Preston reached into the silverware drawer, “we’ve got the budget for another hand. Benny’s doing fine, and we did so well with the hay rotation thanks to Cassie, that we actually had enough extra to sell and help the bank accounts.”
“I was pretty sure that would be the case.” Carson smiled, carrying the stack of dishes to the dining room.
“Does this mean those of us with day jobs don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn anymore?” Rachel pulled out the casserole. “Could someone close the oven door?”
“That’s exactly what it means.” Garret nodded. “Once the male calves are sold, we should be able to hire enough hands that we can all go back to focusing on our day jobs.”
Alice moved to the dining room, pleased that she was no longer the brunt of the conversation, and very thankful for how hard everyone worked. Maybe she’d take a nice pie over to Clint. He really did handle today well. Actually, he handled pretty much everything well. Maybe two pies were in order.
Today had certainly been one hell of an interesting day. If anyone had told Clint that he would be out in the field today, surrounded by stray cattle and staring at Alice Sweet’s legs with a little—okay, a lot—more interest than appropriate for a ranch hand—okay, foreman—to be ogling his employer, he would have told that person to stop smoking the funny stuff.
And yet, as he’d sat here trying to get lost in a dinner of reheated leftovers and a some benign program on TV, his mind kept wandering back to his boss’s legs, to her general feistiness and overall entertaining sense of humor, and then to Carol. When they’d first met at the rodeo, she’d been the prettiest thing he’d seen in a very long time. Long black hair in a ponytail that hung down her back and swished about every time she laughed. Big blue eyes sparkled with delight and a hint of mischief. They probably should have dated longer than the whirlwind two months but he couldn’t keep his hands off of her and spending the rest of his life with her at his side had felt like a pretty darn good idea. Less than a year later they’d had Jason.
At first it had been fun. The baby slept in a drawer of their dresser. They hadn’t thought of it as poor but cute. Then things got crowded. And messy. And there was colic and teething and Carol had been at her wits’ end. Clint, of course, had given up the rodeo scene as soon as she’d told him she was pregnant. It hadn’t been a passion of his anyhow, just a means for extra money. He’d taken a job in town with a local construction companyand had made decent money framing houses. With no choice, they’d moved into a bigger apartment and then as Jason grew and Carol became more and more critical and, well, nagging, he took on a second job and they moved into a house. Things had gotten so bad that he could see it in Jason’s face when he came home and the screaming and fighting would start. He hated it. Hated that he couldn’t make peace with his wife, couldn’t make everyone happy. Every so often she’d be smiling and laughing like the woman he’d fallen in love with and then suddenly, facing a deranged fire-breathing dragon would have been easier. He’d begun to wonder if perhaps she was bipolar or something, but there was no getting her to see anyone.
Shaking his head, his mind jumped back to Alice. With all the horrible things that happened to her in the last few years, he couldn’t imagine her ever losing it the way Carol would. Heaving a sigh, he reached for the manila envelope he’d taken out of the nightstand by his bed. It had sat on the table taunting him through dinner and some rerun of a reality TV show that reminded him why the television had once been called the idiot box. Not for the first time over the years, he’d dumped all the clippings onto the table and began reading. A knock at the door pulled him away. “Come in.”
