He tilted his head and smiled at her. “I think Laurie’s drunk. Is Laurie drunk?”
“She might be.” She giggled. “Are you?”
“Nah. That business with Billy sobered me up, darn it.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“Yeah. Seriously, what if your power goes out?”
“Seriously, it’s night. I’ll be asleep. And I have candles.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her flirtatiously. “I could keep you company.”
“You could go on and get out of here before your dad comes and gets you.”
They both laughed. She loved flirting with Chase and leading him on, and anybody could see that he loved flirting right back at her and being led, but that’s as far as it would ever go, she had figured out, because for all his wild ways, there were certain things Chase would never do. Fooling around-really fooling around-with a wife of one of his brothers was high on that list of taboos for him. Sometimes Laurie thought that Chase, unlikely as it seemed, was the most like her father-in-law of all the Linder siblings, and that his playboy appearance was a cover for a rigid set of principles: you did your work, you respected your elders, and you didn’t mess around where you could cause a mess. Hugh-Jay was more forgiving than that. And it wasn’t Chase who had flunked out of K-State, after all, it was Bobby. Everybody in Rose had expected Chase to be the Linder brother who lived up to his name and pursued Laurie, but he never did, and she had figured out it was because he sensed early on that Hugh-Jay wanted her.
“Sleep tight,” he said, and took the stairs two at a time.
“’Night, Chase,” Laurie sang out, and laughed, because he was hurrying as if he were afraid of her. For a moment she considered calling him back and making it difficult for him to leave, but she was just sober enough to recognize that for the bad idea it was-he wouldn’t weaken, and she’d be mortified.
Also, as much as they annoyed her, she liked being a Linder.
She liked being given a trip to that fancy hotel in Colorado, for instance.
Even before she heard the back door slam behind Chase, she was undoing her wet clothing, unzipping her shorts, pulling her T-shirt over her head, unhooking her bra, and letting it all fall to the floor as she danced in circles toward the bath in the master bedroom.
She stepped into the shower and let the water cascade over her. It was dangerous, people said, to bathe during an electrical storm, but Laurie wasn’t concerned about that. Her life seemed to have come equipped with its own lightning rod that deflected bad luck away from her.
When she got out, she didn’t dry off.
She’d dripped up the stairs, she would drip down the stairs.
It felt wonderful to have the whole house to herself.
At the top of the stairs she suddenly realized she was standing in a completely dark house. She flicked a light switch and nothing happened. While she had been in the shower-where she’d opened the shades to get the illumination of the lightning and lit a candle instead of turning on the lights-the power had gone out.
She felt an urge to walk naked through the dark house where nobody could see her from inside or outside. She took a step toward the stairs and then another few steps and found it lovely and pleasurable to be moving without clothing, feeling the touch of her thighs against each other, her own bare arms brushing against her body.
She looked down at herself, and approved of what she saw.
How many boys and men had wished they could look at and touch what she was seeing and touching? From the time she was a child she’d been aware of the attention of men and that it was edged with something that gave her little thrills in deep places. She crooked her right arm, raised it toward her mouth and licked it, tasting honey. So this was what men tasted on her skin, she thought with amused pride, something sweet and sexy, making her a perfect pastry.
She laughed at that as she started down the steps.
The drinking she’d done made her thoughts scattered, and now they focused briefly on her other-pathetic-brother-in-law. Bobby only made her laugh. Did he think she didn’t catch him looking at her with moon eyes?
She wondered if Hugh-Jay noticed his brothers’ attentions to her.
She hoped he did, because jealousy might make him more eager to please her, and anyway, she was so mad at him that she didn’t care what he thought when she flirted with other men.
How could he? How could her own husband accuse her of stealing?
It wasn’t stealing; it was balancing the scales. Making things more fair.
She was taking money from the accounts of the Colorado ranch, but just a little.
“I have a right,” she said out loud in the dark house as she stepped onto its first floor. The Linders were stingy, in her view; if they weren’t so stingy, she wouldn’t have to pad her own bank account with such pitiful little amounts of… change, really, just a few dollars here and there to buy herself something nice, or to make Jody look pretty so people would admire her daughter. Besides, she was doing the work that Hugh-Jay was supposed to be doing but had no aptitude for, and so therefore what she was taking was only a salary, the one they were too cheap to give her.
“They owe me.”
TWO MILES AWAY, on the front porch of an abandoned farmhouse where he had sat and watched the rain for hours, Hugh-Jay finally made up his mind about what he was going to have to do.
He’d gone to the farmhouse after seeing his mother and daughter in Rose. Upon leaving them, he had mentally kicked himself for turning right-in front of his mother’s car-instead of turning left so she would believe he was heading for the highway to Colorado. It didn’t matter, he tried to convince himself. She would assume that he had errands to run before he left town; she would never suspect that he wasn’t going at all.
So he had made his right turn and kept driving out of Rose.
Five or so miles east he signaled and turned into a road leading to a farm that had failed a few months before and hadn’t been sold yet. Hugh-Jay was depressed to see that prairie dog towns had already popped up in several places. Eventually they’d join into one huge underground mammal city with upright furry sentinels spaced outside atop their holes. He might have found them cute if he didn’t know the destruction they wreaked on farm and ranch land. His sympathy was for the farmer who had gone bust and whose belongings had been auctioned as his family looked on.
Agriculture was hard, Hugh-Jay thought as he parked beside the empty farmhouse.
But not as hard as marriage was turning out to be.
He got out of his truck and slowly walked up to the front porch.
The wooden slats creaked under his boots.
He put a hand on a post and felt the rough surface of peeling paint, inhaled the smell of dirt rising from the humidity beneath the broken steps.
People he knew had lived here. There’d been small children playing on this porch and in the yard, filling the air with their laughter and the crying that accompanied skinned knees, bumped heads, and hurt feelings. He’d have sworn he could still hear one of them yell, “Mom!” It made his own heart hurt to think that if he didn’t find a way to fix the rift in his marriage, it might be his house that would be haunted by the sounds of a family that didn’t live there anymore.
Hugh-Jay had sat down on the porch swing and pushed off with one boot.
He had a bad decision to make and felt paralyzed by it.
His dad wanted him to check out the honesty of the Colorado ranch manager, but Hugh-Jay knew that it didn’t need checking. There was nothing wrong with the man’s honesty, or ethics, or morals, or whatever else you wanted to call it when a person either did or didn’t take money that didn’t belong to him.
The ranch manager didn’t even know there was anything amiss.
When the manager sent his bills, everything was in order.
It was only when it left Hugh-Jay’s own house that holes appeared in it.