Heart of Stone

“I could hire somebody to do all that.” Ella waved the idea away.

“Could you afford to pay them?” Carly retorted.

Ella frowned. She was hard put just to pay utilities and buy groceries. But she didn’t reply.

Carly eyed her quietly. “If you push her, she’ll leave. Then what will you do?”

“I’ll do my own housework and cooking,” Ella said grandly.

Carly shook her head. “Okay. It’s your life. But you’re missing out.”

“On what?” Ella muttered.

“On the only family you have,” Carly replied in a subdued tone. “I don’t have anybody,” she added. “My parents are dead. I had no siblings. I was married, but I was never able to have a child. My husband is dead, too. You have a child, and you don’t want her. I’d have given anything to have a child of my own.”

“You can have Keely,” Ella said, laughing. “I’ll give her to you.”

Carly moved toward the door. “You can’t give people away, Ella.” She looked back. “You don’t really have anybody, either.”

“I have men.” Ella laughed coldly. “I can have any man I want.”

“For a night,” her friend agreed. “Old age is coming up fast, for both of us. Do you really want to drive your only child away? She’ll marry someday and have children of her own. You won’t even be allowed to see your grandchildren.”

“I’m not having grandchildren,” Ella shot back. “I’m not going to be old. I’m only in my late thirties!”

Carly laughed. “You’re heading toward fifty, Ella,” she reminded her friend. “All the beauty treatments in the world aren’t going to change that.”

“I’ll have a face-lift,” the other woman returned. “I’ll sell more land to pay for it.”

That was unwise. Ella had already sold most of the land her family had left her. If she sold the rest, she was going to be hard-pressed just to pay bills. But Carly could see that it did no good to argue with her.

“Good night,” she told Ella.

Ella made a face at her, collapsed on the pillow and was asleep in seconds. Carly didn’t say anything else. She just closed the door.

Keely put on a pair of brown corduroy slacks and a beige turtleneck sweater and ran a brush through her thick, straight blond hair. She hoped Clark didn’t have an expensive date in mind. She couldn’t dress for it. She threw an old beige Berber coat over her clothes and grabbed her purse.

True to his word, Clark pulled up in the yard in exactly ten minutes, driving his sports car.

Carly came out of Ella’s bedroom just as Keely was leaving.

“Is she asleep?” Keely asked dully.

“Yes.” Carly was worried, and it showed. “She should never have said that to you,” she added. “She loved you when you were a baby. You wouldn’t remember, you were too little, but I do. She was so happy…”

“So happy that she now treats me this way?” Keely asked, hurt.

Carly sighed. “She was different after your father left. She started drinking then, and it’s just gotten worse year after year.” She saw that she wasn’t getting through to the younger woman. “There are things you don’t know about your parents, Keely,” she said gently.

“Such as?”

Carly shook her head. “That’s not my place to tell you.” She turned away. “I’m going home. She’ll sleep until morning.”

“Lock the door when you leave, please,” Keely said.

“I’m leaving now. You can lock it.” Carly got her purse and stopped just as the door closed behind the two women.

“I’m as bad as she is, sometimes,” the older woman confessed quietly. “I shouldn’t make fun of the way you are, and neither should she. But you don’t fight back, Keely. You must learn to do that. You’re nineteen. Don’t spend the rest of your life knuckling under, just to keep peace.”

Keely frowned. “I don’t.”

“You do, baby,” Carly said softly. She sighed. “Ella and I are a bad influence on you. What you need to do is get an apartment of your own and live your own life.”

Keely searched the other woman’s eyes. “I’ve thought about that….”

“Do it,” Carly advised. “Get out while you can.”

Keely frowned. “What do you mean?”

Carly hesitated. “I’ve said too much already. Enjoy your date. Good night.”

Carly walked off to her small import car. Keely watched her for a minute before she went down the steps to where Clark was waiting in his sleek Lincoln. He leaned across and opened the door for her.

He grinned. “I’d come around and open it, but I’m too lazy,” he teased.

She smiled back. He was like a kinder version of Boone. Clark had the same black hair and dark eyes, but he was a little shorter than his brother, and his hair was wavy—unlike Boone’s, which was straight.

“Neither one of you resemble your sister,” she remarked.

He shrugged. “Winnie got our mother’s coloring. She doesn’t like that. We hated our mother.”

“So Winnie said.”

He glanced at her as they pulled out of her mother’s yard. “We share the feeling, don’t we, Keely?” he probed. “Your mother is a walking headache.”

She nodded. “She was in high form tonight,” she said wearily. “Drunk and vicious.”

“What was Carly saying to you?”

“That I have to learn to stand up to her,” she said. “Surprising, isn’t it, coming from mother’s best friend? The two of them make fun of me all the time.”

Clark glanced at her, and he didn’t smile. “She’s right about that. You need to stand up to my brother, too. Boone walks all over people who won’t fight back.”

She shivered. “I’m not taking on your brother,” she said. “He’s scary.”

“Scary? Boone?”

She averted her gaze to the window. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

He was disconcerted by her remark, but he pulled himself together quickly. “Sure! I just heard that the Chinese are launching another probe toward the moon.”

She gave him a wry look.

“You don’t like astronautics,” he murmured. “Okay. Politics?”

She groaned out loud. “I’m so sick of presidential candidates that I’m thinking of moving to someplace where nobody runs for public office.”

“The Amazon jungle comes to mind.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If I went far enough in, I might escape television and the Internet.”

“I can see the headlines now,” he said with mock horror. “Local vet technician eaten by jaguar in darkest jungles of South America!”

“No self-respecting jaguar would want to eat a human being,” she retorted. “Especially one who eats anchovies on pizza.”

“I didn’t know you liked anchovies.”

She sighed. “I don’t. But when I was little, I discovered that if I ordered them, my dad would let me have more than two slices of pizza.”

He laughed. “Your father must have been a card.”

“He was.” She smiled reminiscently. “Animals loved him. I’ve seen him feed tigers right out of his hand without ever being bitten. Even snakes liked him.”

“That animal park must have been something else.”

“It was wonderful,” she replied. “We all loved it. But there was a tragic accident, and Dad lost everything.”

“Somebody got eaten?”

“Almost,” she replied, unwilling to say more. “There was a lawsuit.”

“And he lost,” he guessed.

She didn’t correct him. “It destroyed him.”

He frowned. “Did he commit suicide?”

She hesitated. This was Clark. He was her friend. She knew that he’d never tell Boone or even Winnie without asking her first. “He’s not dead,” she said quietly. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. He developed a…a drinking problem.” She couldn’t tell him the whole truth. She glanced at him worriedly. “You won’t tell anybody?”

“Of course not.”

She studied her purse in her lap, turning it restlessly in her hands. “He left me with Mother and took off. That was six years ago, and I haven’t heard a word from him. For all I know, he could be dead.”

“You loved him.”

She nodded. “Very much.” She moved restlessly.

“What is it?”

She felt the pain of her mother’s words go right through her. “My mother said that she never wanted me. I ruined her figure,” she added with a hollow laugh.

“Good God! And I thought our mother was bad!” He stopped at a traffic light heading into Jacobsville and looked toward her. “Isn’t it a hell of a shame that we can’t choose our parents?”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “I was just sick when she said it. I should have guessed. She didn’t like me when I left, and she liked me even less when Dad dumped me on her, and now I think she hates me. I’ve tried to please her, keeping house and cooking and cleaning, but she doesn’t appreciate it. She grudges me the very food I eat.” She turned toward him. “I’ve got to get out of that house,” she said desperately. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Mrs. Brown runs a very respectable boardinghouse,” he began.

She grimaced. “Yes, and charges a respectable price for rooms. I can’t afford it on my salary.”

“Hit Bentley up for a raise,” he suggested.

“Oh, right, I’ll do that first thing tomorrow,” she drawled.

“You’re scared of Bentley. You’re scared of Boone.” He pulled out into traffic. “You’re even scared of your mother. You have to step up and claim your own life, Keely.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t go through life being afraid of people. Especially people like my brother and Bentley Rydel. Do you know why they’re scary?” he persisted. “It’s because it’s hard work to talk to them. They’re both basically introverts who find it difficult to relate to other people. Consequently they’re quiet and somber and they don’t go out of their way to join in activities. They’re loners.”

She sighed. “I’m a loner, too, in my own way. But I don’t stand on the sidelines and glare at people all the time—or, worse, pretend they’re not there.”

“Is that Boone’s latest tactic?” he mused, chuckling. “He ignores you, does he?”

“He did until I argued about Bailey’s condition.”

“Thank God you did,” he said fervently. “Bailey belongs to Boone, but we all love the old fellow. I’ll never understand why Boone didn’t realize what had happened to him. He’s a cattleman—he’s seen bloat before.”

“His girlfriend convinced him that I was trying to get attention, using Bailey to lure Boone to my place of work.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” he burst out. “Boone’s not that stupid!”

“Well, apparently my mother’s been telling him that I have a crush on him, and now he thinks everything I do or say is an attempt to worm my way into his life,” she said bitterly.

“Ella told him that?” he exclaimed.

“Yes. And she told him that I’m sleeping with Bentley.”

“Does Bentley know that you’re sleeping with him?” he asked innocently.

She laughed. “I don’t know. I’ll ask him.”

He burst out laughing, too. “That’s more like it, kid,” he said. “You have to learn to roll with the punches and not take life so seriously.”

“It feels pretty serious to me lately,” she replied. “I feel like I’ve hit a wall tonight.”

“You should push your mother into one,” he told her. “Or better yet, tell her what a lousy mother she’s been.”

“She doesn’t listen when she’s drunk, and she’s mostly away from home when she’s sober.” She pursed her lips. “I work for veterinarians. I’ve been professionally taught to let sleeping dogs lie.”

He smiled. “Have you, now?”

“Where are you taking me?” she asked when he took a state highway instead of the Jacobsville road. “I thought we were going to a movie.”

“I’m not in the mood for a movie. I thought we might go to San Antonio for shrimp,” he replied. “I’m in the mood for some. What do you think?”

“We’ll be very late getting back,” she reminded him worriedly.

“What the hell,” he scoffed. “You can tell your mother you’re sleeping with me now instead of Bentley and she can mind her own business about when you come home.”

Her eyes almost popped.

He saw that and grinned. “Which brings to mind a matter I need a little help with. I think,” he added, “that you and I can be the solution for each others’ problems. If you’re game.”

All the way to San Antonio, she wondered what he meant, and how she would fit into his “solution.”

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