McKettricks of Texas: Garrett

CHAPTER TWO

THE COMBINATION OF A FIERCELY BLUE autumn sky, oak leaves turning to bright yellow in the trees edging the sundappled creek and the heart-piercing love she felt for her little boy made Julie ache over the bittersweet perfection of the present moment.

She turned the pink Cadillac onto the winding dirt road leading to the old Ruiz house, where Tate and Libby and Tate’s twin daughters were living, and glanced into the rearview mirror.

Calvin sat stoically in his car seat in back, staring out the window.

Since Julie had to be at work at Blue River High School a full hour before Calvin’s kindergarten class began, she’d been dropping him off at Libby’s on her way to town over the week they’d been staying on the Silver Spur. He adored his aunt, and Tate, and Tate’s girls, Audrey and Ava, who were two years older than Calvin and thus, in his opinion, sophisticated women of the world. Today, though, he was just too quiet.

“Everything okay, buddy?” Julie asked, tooting the Caddie’s horn in greeting as her sister Libby appeared on the front porch of the house she and Tate were renovating and started down the steps.

“I guess we’ll have to move back to town when the bugs are gone from our cottage and they take down the tent,” he said. “We won’t get to live in the country anymore.”

“That was always the plan,” Julie reminded her son gently. “That we’d go back to the cottage when it’s safe.” Recently, she’d considered offering to buy the small but charming house she’d been renting from month to month since Calvin was a baby and making it their permanent home. Thanks to a windfall, she had the means, but this morning the idea lacked its usual appeal.

Calvin suffered from intermittent asthma attacks, though he hadn’t had an incident for a long time. Suppose some vestige of the toxins used to eliminate termites lingered after the tenting process was finished, and damaged his health—or her own—in some insidious way?

While Julie was trying to shake off that semiparanoid idea, Libby started across the grassy lawn toward the car, grinning and waving one hand in welcome. She wore jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt and white sneakers, and she’d clipped her shiny light-brown hair up on top of her head.

A year older than Julie, Libby had always been strikingly pretty, but since she and Tate McKettrick, her onetime high school sweetheart, had rediscovered each other just that summer, she’d been downright beautiful. Libby glowed, incandescent with love and from being thoroughly loved in return.

Julie pushed the button to lower the back window on the other side of the car, smiling with genuine affection for her sister even as she felt a brief but poignant stab of stark jealousy.

What would it be like to be loved—no, cherished—by a full-grown, committed man like Tate? It was an experience Julie had long-since given up on, for herself, anyway. She was independent and capable, and of course she had no desire to be otherwise, but it would have been nice, once in a while, not to have to be strong every minute of every day and night, not to blaze all the trails and fight all the dragons.

Libby gave Julie a glance before she leaned through the back window to plant a smacking welcome kiss on Calvin’s forehead.

“‘Good morning, Aunt Libby,’” she coached cheerfully, when Calvin didn’t speak to her to right away.

“Good morning, Aunt Libby,” Calvin repeated, with a reluctant giggle.

“He’s a little moody this morning,” Julie said.

“I’m not moody,” Calvin argued, climbing out of the car to stand beside Libby on the gravel driveway, then reaching inside for his backpack. “I just want to live on a ranch, that’s all. I want to have my very own horse, like Audrey and Ava do. Is that too much to ask?”

Julie sighed. “Well, yeah, Calvin, it kind of is too much to ask.”

Calvin didn’t say anything more; he merely shook his head and, lugging his backpack, headed off toward the house, his small shoulders stooped.

“What was that all about?” Libby asked, moving around to Julie’s side of the car and bending to look in at her.

Julie genuinely didn’t have time for a long discussion, but she had always confided in Libby, and now it was virtually automatic, especially when she was upset.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have let you and Tate talk me into staying on the Silver Spur,” she fretted. “It’s only been a week, but Calvin’s already too used to living like a McKettrick—riding horses, swimming in that indoor pool, watching movies in a media room, for heaven’s sake. I can’t give him that kind of life, Libby. I’m not even sure I’d want to if I could. What if he’s getting spoiled?”

Libby raised an eyebrow. “Take a breath, Jules,” she said. “You’re dramatizing a little, don’t you think? Calvin is a good kid, and it would take a lot more than a week or two of high living at the ranch to spoil him. Both of you are under extra stress—Calvin just started kindergarten, and you’re back to teaching full-time, with your house under a tent because of termites—and then there’s the whole Gordon thing….” Libby stopped talking, reached through the window to squeeze Julie’s shoulder. “The point is—things will even out pretty soon. Just give it time.”

Julie worked up a smile, tapped at the face of her watch with one index finger. Easy for you to say, she thought, but what she said out loud was, “Gotta go.”

Libby nodded and stepped away from the car, raised a hand in farewell. She seemed reluctant to let Julie go, and a worried expression flickered in her blue eyes as she watched her back up, turn around and drive off.

Libby had done her little-girl best to stand in after their mother had abandoned the family years before. She’d given up finishing college and arguably a lot more besides when their dad, Will Remington, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Libby had moved back to Blue River, started the Perk Up Coffee Shop—now reduced to a vacant lot across the alley from the house they’d all grown up in—and looked after their father as his illness progressed.

Of course, Julie had helped with his care as much as possible and so had Paige, but just the same, most of the hard stuff had fallen to Libby. Sure, she was the eldest, but the age difference was minor—they’d been born one right after the other, three children in three years. The truth was, Libby had been willing to make sacrifices Julie and Paige couldn’t have managed at the time.

Julie bit down on her lower lip as the town limits came into view, and she began reducing her speed. Their mother, Marva, had reappeared in Blue River months ago, moved into an apartment, and tried, in her own way, to establish some kind of relationship with her daughters. The results had been less than fabulous.

At first, Libby, Julie and Paige had resisted the woman’s every overture, but even after deserting them when they were small, breaking their hearts and their father’s as well, Marva was blithely convinced that a fresh start was just a matter of letting bygones be bygones.

In time, Julie and Paige had both warmed up to Marva somewhat, Libby less so.

The Cadillac bumped over potholes in the gravel parking lot behind Blue River High. The long, low-slung stucco building had grown up on the site of an old Spanish mission, though only a small part of the original structure remained, serving as a center courtyard. Classrooms, a small cafeteria and a gymnasium had been added over the decades, and during an oil boom in the mid-1930s, Clay McKettrick II, known as JR in that time-honored Southern way of denoting “juniors,” had financed the construction of the auditorium, with its two hundred plush theater seats, fine stage and rococo molding around the painted ceiling.

Erected on school property, the auditorium belonged to the entire community. Various civic organizations held their meetings and other events there, and several different denominations had used it as a church on Sunday mornings, while their own buildings were under construction or being renovated.

The auditorium, cool and shadowy and smelling faintly of mildew, had always been a place of almost magical solace for Julie, especially in high school, when she’d had leading roles in so many plays.

Although she’d performed with several professional road companies later on, Julie had never wanted to be an actress and live in glamorous places like New York or Los Angeles. All along, she’d planned on—and worked at—getting her teaching certificate, returning to Blue River and keeping the theater going.

There was no room in the budget for a drama department—the high school theater group supported itself by putting on two productions a year, one of them a musical, and charging modest admission. Like her now-retired predecessor, Miss Idetta Scrobbins, Julie earned her paycheck by teaching English classes—the drama club and the plays they put on were a labor of love.

Julie was thinking about the next project—three one-act plays written by some of her best students—as she hurried down the center aisle and through the doorway to the left of the stage, where she’d transformed an unused supply closet into a sort of hideaway. Officially, her office was her classroom, but it was here that she met with students and came up with some of her best ideas.

Hastily, she tossed her brown-bag lunch into the small refrigerator sitting on top of a file cabinet, kicked off her flat shoes and pulled on the low-heeled pumps she kept stashed in a desk drawer. She flipped on her computer—it was old and took forever to boot up—locked up her purse and raced out of the hideout, back up the aisle and out into the September sunshine.

She was five minutes late for the staff meeting, and Principal Dulles would not be pleased.

Everyone else was already there when Julie dashed into the school library and dropped into a utilitarian folding chair at one of the three long tables where students read and did homework. The library doubled as a study hall throughout the school day.

Up front, the red-faced principal puffed out his cheeks, turning a stub of chalk end over end in one hand, and cleared his throat. Julie’s best friend at work, Helen Marcus, gave her a light poke with her elbow and whispered, “Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything.”

Julie smiled at that, looked around at the half-dozen other teachers who were her colleagues. She knew that Dulles, a middle-aged man from far away, made no secret of his opinion that Blue River, Texas, hardly offered more in the way of cultural stimulation than a prairie-dog town would have. He considered her a flake because of her colorful clothing and her penchant for putting on and directing plays.

For all of that, Arthur was a good person.

Like Julie, most of the other members of the staff had been born and raised there. They’d come home to teach after college because they knew Blue River needed them; high pay and job perks weren’t a factor, of course. To them, odd breed that they were, the community’s kids mattered most.

Dulles cleared his throat, glaring at Julie, who smiled placidly back at him.

“As some of you already know,” he began, “the McKettrick Foundation has generously agreed to match whatever funds we can raise on our own to buy new computers and special software for our library. Our share, however, amounts to a considerable sum.”

The McKettricks were community-minded; they’d always been quick to lend a hand wherever one was needed, but the foundation’s longstanding policy, except in emergencies, was to involve the whole town in raising funds as well. At the name McKettrick, Julie felt an odd quickening of some kind, at once disturbing and delicious, thinking back to her encounter with Garrett in the ranch-house kitchen.

The others shifted in their seats, checked their watches and glanced up at the wall clock. Students were beginning to arrive; the ringing slam of locker doors and the lilting hum of their conversation sounded from the wide hallway just outside the library.

Julie waited attentively, sensing that Arthur’s speech was mainly directed at her, but unable to imagine why that should be so.

No one spoke.

Arthur seemed reluctant, but he finally went on. He looked straight at Julie, confirming her suspicions. “It’s a pity the drama club is staging those three one-act plays for the fall production, instead of doing a musical.”