Читать книгу Rodeo Family - Mary Sullivan - Страница 13

Chapter Three

Nadine parked her car on Main Street, wishing for the hundredth time that she had a garage to protect it from the elements. She needed a car in rural Montana, but if something serious happened to the one she had, she wouldn’t have money for another unless her circumstances changed drastically.

She hadn’t saved money in New York. She might have worked long hours, but living there was expensive.

Lee didn’t pay her well. If she didn’t get this story and he fired her, getting another job in her field would be nearly impossible after that incident in New York.

She couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t face her own hubris. Had left it behind in the Big Apple.

Her stomach cramped. She picked up her bag and walked down Main to the Rodeo Wrangler office, staring at the gold and black lettering on the door.

Lee had made promises when she’d come home.

He had no children. No heirs. He’d intimated he wanted to retire. He needed someone to take over.

That someone would be her.

Coming home in a state of utter loss, his promise had been a prayer answered.

But now she faced this changed man and his unreasonable demand.

Lee stood in the large plate glass window watching her approach.

When she’d worked for him in high school, she had never gotten a bad feeling from Lee. He’d given her a first shot at journalism and she had been grateful. Who was this man he’d become and what had he done with the Lee Beeton she’d known?

Despite her anger and feelings of betrayal, sadness filled her.

He’d once been a decent man.

Judging by the look in his eye, he was in the same mood as when she’d left to go out to the Brandt ranch. He would want a full report, she was sure. His gaze seemed almost malevolent.

Boy, she was chock-full of exaggeration today. Or maybe not.

How could she have misjudged him so badly? As a teenager, she had thanked him profusely for the opportunities and the experience. And when she’d returned to Rodeo a year ago with her tail between her legs, Lee had once again agreed to give her a job. She’d seen signs that he had changed. Grouchiness. Tension. Impatience. Her friends had said he’d been slowly becoming more bad-tempered over the years. Nadine had ignored all of this, but could no longer.

Not with his demand for dirt on a fellow citizen.

She stepped into the office.

Without preamble, he asked, “Did you get it?”

“The story? Of course not, Lee. That was just the first interview. I can’t jump into the nitty-gritty without gaining his trust first.”

“Trust. Yeah. I guess so.”

He guessed so? Lee knew how to conduct an interview and how to handle a subject. He’d been a good journalist in his time, but these days he seemed desperate. What was going on with him?

“Lee, if your mother has a memory of something fishy in the Brandt family, why don’t you just ask her about it? Why send me to do your dirty work?”

“Because she isn’t telling me. She said she needs to talk to Richard Brandt.”

“Rick? Zach’s father?”

“No. Richard—Zach’s grandfather.”

Dread settled into Nadine’s stomach. “His grandfather who’s been dead for decades? Does your mother not understand that he’s gone?”

“Sometimes she’s lucid and sometimes she isn’t.”

“So how can you trust anything she has to say? Maybe all her memories are suspect.”

“Naw. When’s she lucid, she’ll remember the dress she wore on her first date and what they had for dinner that night.”

“But that must have been one of the most significant nights of her life,” Nadine ventured. “It makes sense she’d remember those details, but how can we trust that her memory of a secret about the Brandts is accurate, even if she tells you about it when she’s lucid?”

“My mother and Zach’s grandmother were best friends.”

“I see.”

Light through the window haloed Lee’s head, the wisps of his remaining hair highlighted like cilia.

He wasn’t taking care of himself these days. He used to be a nice-looking man with kind eyes, but he no longer seemed to care about his appearance. His old cardigan had a hole in it. A blob on his shirt that resembled Italy in the Rorschach test of food stains might have been made by spilled coffee. Some days, Nadine was certain he had forgotten to bathe.

Today wasn’t one of those, thank goodness. The office wasn’t large enough for her to avoid him when he smelled ripe.

At first she’d been concerned for his sake, for the loss of an old friend, but this morning he’d gone so far she was almost past caring. Almost.

On the drive back into town, she’d done a lot of thinking. “Why do you need me, Lee? Why not wait until your mom has a lucid moment and just listen to what she has to say about the past?”

Lee bristled. “I’m paying you good money to do a job, girl, and you’ll do it.”

Good money? Not by a long shot. And girl? What kind of way was that to speak to an employee? Lee didn’t used to be rude.

“My mother won’t confide in me. She rarely talks to me anymore. When she does, it’s by accident.” His gaze slid away from hers. “A year or so ago, we had a fight.”

A falling-out with Zach. A fight with his mother. She remembered them as being close. “Why not wait until a day when maybe she’s forgotten about that?”

“She’s never forgiven me for the things I said.” He added bitterly, “Her dementia has destroyed more memories than I’ve probably ever had in my lifetime, but she knows every word of that conversation by heart.” He turned away from Main Street and said, “That’s why I need you. She always liked you. She would talk to you.”

“I’m not sure she would. You said first she would talk to only Zach and then only to Richard, his grandfather.”

“Then get the secret from Zach,” he snapped.

“Do you honestly think Zach will just give up a family secret that’s so titillating you think it will sell extra issues of your paper?”

“No, he won’t just give it up.” Sarcasm. Another new feature with Lee. “Use your skills. Use whatever you have in your arsenal to get it out of him.”

“But—”

“Where else do you think you could get a job in town? This is the only newspaper for miles around. If you want to continue to live in Rodeo and keep this job, then you’ll do whatever you have to do to get me that article.”

Something was making him desperate, and he was dead serious.

Sure, there were laws against this kind of workplace harassment and coercion, but she couldn’t afford a lawyer.

He was right. If he fired her, she would have to move away from her friends to find another job in reporting. She’d come back home because of a mistake she had made, only one, but it had been a doozy.

She’d come back to the only home she knew, not because of the town or the geography, but because of her friends. They were her only family. Without them she was alone. That thought caused an ache so deep inside of her it felt like fire ate at her belly.

Her aunt had been her sole remaining blood relative. She had died four years ago and had decided to ignore Nadine in death. She’d left nothing to Nadine, not a single penny or knickknack, as though every speck of resentment she’d felt toward her niece had followed her into the afterlife.

So Nadine’s family was Rachel, Violet, Honey and Max, all of them tied together by common experiences and similar heartbreaks. They were the town fair’s Revival Committee, but also the best of friends, and now Rachel’s new sister-in-law, Samantha, had been added to the mix.

Nadine liked Rodeo. She liked the people here. She respected them.

Then Lee had told her the newspaper could be hers someday, a dream come true for her in Rodeo.

When she’d left town the first time, it had been her choice. She didn’t want to be pushed out by someone else now, by Lee’s need for a dirty article. Unfortunately, she couldn’t live without the measly paycheck he paid her. Rodeo wasn’t exactly a bustling town. Nadine wasn’t even certain Vy could give her job at the diner, friend or not.

But even more important than losing a paycheck, she couldn’t possibly lose her friendships. She’d lost a lot in New York City. Losing her friends would be far worse.

Nadine stared at her boss. “Lee, what’s wrong?” She might be angry with him, but he had given her her first job and had encouraged her in her choice of career. He’d had enough faith in her skills to tell her that she could someday run this office. The small part of her that still cared worried about him.

“What’s wrong?” she repeated.

He rubbed his stomach as though it ached. “Nothing.”

Then he scrubbed his hands over his face. “I—I can’t tell you.”

He sounded more like the old Lee, as though he lurked inside of this new harder person.

“What can I do?” Nadine asked.

“Can you just get the story? Please?” Desperation again. “I meant what I said this morning, Nadine. Get me that story.”

His tone might be softer and less mean, but the new Lee was determined, leaving Nadine with no choice but to do what he wanted.

He glanced at her then away. “Take the afternoon off. Tomorrow will be soon enough to get back at it.”

A peace offering, just when she was prepared to hate him.

She left and closed the door behind her.

When she stepped out onto Main Street, it looked the same as always...but also not. She’d gone through this before, in the city where her life had fallen apart. People walked down the street, smiling and waving as though life were normal. As though disaster, or the terrifying potential for it, hadn’t rocked her world.

Her passion had always been journalism. It had given her an escape from loneliness and grief.

She’d lost New York City and that had been monumentally awful. This would be even worse. Rodeo was home. When she’d left NYC, she’d known she had Rodeo to fall back on. If she lost this job and Rodeo, she would have nothing.

If she got a job working for a newspaper in another small town, someplace desperate enough to hire her despite her mistake, she wouldn’t have the warm cloak of her friendships to keep her sadness at bay.

Long-distance friendship had been okay while she had the excitement of her career in New York, but life in another small town without them close by would be unbearable.

She hadn’t thought the bottom could fall out of her world again.

Nadine unlocked her door, trudged up the stairs to her apartment above the office and stepped into a neat, tidy, arid space that returned a bit of her calm to her. She hung her dress in the green section of her bedroom closet and took off her baby blue heels. She folded each shoe in the tissue paper from their box, then slid the box back into place. All of her nice clothes were leftovers from her career in New York, and she planned to make them last.

She’d only worn her dress for half the day. The next time she wore it, she would rinse it by hand. Like her car, she couldn’t afford to replace her clothing. She didn’t know what she would do once they wore out.

She could shop in thrift stores, or the consignment shop in the next town, but her beautiful clothes were the shield that blocked out the critical voice in her head that belonged to her aunt.

Consigning that worry to a far corner of her mind, she sat down to transcribe the recorded interview, only to realize how truly little she had wrung out of Zach. She tossed down her pen, glared around her spotless, well-ordered apartment and despaired.

For a whole year, she had avoided feeling. She’d lived a parched existence because it was the only life she could handle. Lee had forced her feelings, all of her high emotions, back to the forefront. She was being drawn back into life.

She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to feel.

She didn’t want to remember.

The silence in the apartment resounded as though it had life and breath. She needed to get out of here.

Her phone rang. She grabbed it and checked the number. Violet. Thank God. When she answered, Nadine swallowed and forced herself to sound normal.

“What are you doing for supper?” Vy asked.

“Salad and tuna. Do you want to join me?”

“Thought you’d never ask. I’ll be there at six.”

Nadine spent the rest of the afternoon working on a couple of her regular columns, about events in the community, along with news about the townspeople that did not constitute gossip. She phoned around to get all of her facts straight. She sifted through her emails for announcements from people about the births, marriages and job promotions that filled her with pleasure, while deaths were few, thank goodness.

Vy arrived at six on the dot. Nadine rushed to her and gave her a big hug, holding on longer than she should have.

“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” Vy pulled away, a searching look on her face.

“Lee’s being an ass.”

“He’s been strange lately. What’s going on with him?”

“I have no idea. He has these moods swings. At the moment, he’s being strange and demanding.”

“You said you were going out to Zach’s farm today to interview him,” Vy said. “How did that go?”

“Like pulling teeth.”

“What did you expect? The guy’s sociable, but private.”

Private with a capital P.

Nadine prepared two servings of a salad and canned tuna with a sprinkling of lemon pepper. Vy nibbled on sliced radishes while Nadine worked.

“Hey.” She swatted her friend’s hand away. “There won’t be any left for the salad.”

“I’m starving.”

“How can that be? You work in a diner.”

“I’m pregnant, remember? I eat all the time these days.”

“You’re looking really good. You’re glowing. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true.”

Vy grinned. The pregnancy might have been unplanned but all had worked out in the end, with the new stranger in town, Sam Carmichael, falling like a log for Vy and deciding to stay and marry her. How could he not? Vy was a great person.

Nadine returned the lemon pepper to the spice rack between the ground ginger and the mustard seed.

Vy set the table and they sat down to eat, discussing the upcoming revival of the renovated rodeo and fair. It had run for over a hundred years in Rodeo every summer without fail, until the owner retired fifteen years ago. He’d inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father.

His son had not been willing to carry on and the tradition had been broken.

Too many of the town’s young were leaving. Nadine and her friends had decided it was time to do something about that, and they hoped the revival of the fair would be a viable solution for bringing in money and creating jobs.

Since no one else had managed to come up with solutions to help out their town, they’d taken it on.

This year, the fair would run for ten days spanning two weekends.

If it was a success, they could consider making it permanent and maybe even run it for longer in the coming years. Vy carried their dishes to the sink. “Sam’s going to donate a couple of thousand dollars for you to use for more promotion.”