Cowboy Ever After: Big Sky Mountain

She couldn’t remember one single instance in all the time she’d known Hutch Carmody when he hadn’t been completely sure of everything and everybody, especially himself.

“That’s helpful,” she said mildly.

Any moment now Madison would be back in the room, thereby curtailing anything but the most mundane conversation.

“Joslyn tells me there’s a cleanup day over at Pioneer Cemetery on Saturday,” he finally said, after casting about visibly for something to say. “There’ll be a town picnic afterward, like always, and, well, I was just wondering if you and Madison and Daisy might be interested in going along.” He paused, cleared his throat. “With me.”

Kendra was astounded, not so much by the invitation as by Hutch’s apparent nervousness. Was he afraid she’d say no?

Or was he afraid she’d say yes?

“Okay,” she agreed, as a compromise between the two extremes. She wanted, she realized, to see how he’d react.

Would he backpedal?

Instead he favored her with a dazzling grin, rose from his chair and passed her to set his coffee cup, still mostly full, in the sink. Their arms brushed and his nearness, the hard heat of his very masculine body, sent a jolt of sweet fire through her.

“Okay,” he said with affable finality.

Madison was back by then, holding up her clean hands for Kendra to see but obviously more interested in Hutch than in her mother.

“Very good,” Kendra said approvingly, and began moving briskly around the infinitesimal kitchen, setting out plates and silverware and glasses—which Madison promptly counted.

“Aren’t you hungry, cowboy man?” she asked Hutch when the tally was two places at the table, rather than three.

He looked down at Madison with such fondness that Kendra felt another pang of—something. “Can’t stay,” he said. “I have horses to look after and they like their supper served on time, just like people do.”

Madison’s eyes widened. “You have horses?” From her tone she might have asked, “You can walk on water?”

“Couldn’t very well call myself a cowboy if I didn’t have horses,” Hutch said reasonably.

Madison pondered that, then nodded in agreement. Her eyes widened. “Can I ride one of your horses sometime? Please?”

“That would definitely be your mother’s call,” Hutch told her. It was grown-up vernacular, but Madison understood and immediately turned an imploring face to Kendra.

“Maybe sometime,” Kendra said, because she couldn’t quite get to a flat-out no. Not with all that ingenuous hope beaming up at her.

Remarkably, that noncommittal answer seemed to satisfy Madison. She scrambled into her chair at the table and waited for supper to start.

“See you on Saturday,” Hutch said lightly.

And then he tousled Madison’s hair, nodded to Kendra and the dog, and left the house.

“Are we going to see the cowboy man on Saturday?” Madison asked eagerly. Once again, it struck Kendra that, for a four-year-old, the child didn’t miss much.

“Yes,” Kendra said, setting the salad bowl in the center of the table and then pouring milk for herself and Madison. Daisy curled up on her dog bed in the corner, rested her muzzle on her forepaws, and rolled her lively brown eyes from Madison to Kendra and back again. “The whole town gets together every year to spruce the place up for the rodeo and the carnival. Lots of people like to visit the Pioneer Cemetery while they’re here, and we like it to look presentable, so you and I and Hutch will be helping out there. After the work is done, there’s always a picnic, and games for the kids to play.”

“Games?” Madison was intrigued. “What kind of games?”

“Sack races.” Kendra smiled, remembering happy times. “Things like that. There are even prizes.”

“What’s a sack race?” Madison pursued, a little frown creasing the alabaster skin between her eyebrows.

Kendra explained about stepping into a feed sack, holding it at waist level and hopping toward the finish line. She didn’t mention the three-legged race, not wanting to describe that, too, but she smiled at the memory of herself and Joslyn tied together at the ankles and laughing hysterically when they lost their balance and tumbled into the venerable cemetery grass.

“And there are prizes?” Madison prompted.

Kendra nodded. “I won a doll once. She had a real camera hanging around her neck by a plastic strap. I still have her, somewhere.”

Madison’s eyes were huge. “Wow,” she said. “There were cameras when you were a little girl?”

Kendra laughed. “Yes,” she replied, “there were cameras. There were cars, too, and airplanes and even TVs.”

Madison pondered all this, the turning gears in her little brain practically visible behind her forehead. “Wow,” she repeated in awe.

After supper, Madison had her bath and put on her pajamas, and Kendra popped a favorite DVD of an animated movie into the player attached to the living room TV.

Madison snuggled on the floor with Daisy, one arm flung companionably across the small dog’s gleaming back, and the two of them were quickly absorbed in the on-screen story.

Kendra, relieved that she wouldn’t have to sit through the movie for what must have been the seventy-second time, set up her laptop on the freshly cleared kitchen table and booted it up.

She’d surf the web for a while, she decided, and see if there were any for-sale-by-owner listings posted for the Parable/Three Trees area. She was, after all, a working real estate broker, and sometimes a well-placed phone call to said owners would produce a new client. Most folks didn’t realize all that was entailed in selling a property themselves—title searches and tax liens were only some of the snags they might run into.

Alas, despite her good intentions, Kendra ended up running a search on Hutch Carmody instead, using the key word wedding.

The page that came up might as well have been called “We Hate Hutch.”

Kendra found herself in the odd position of wanting to defend him—and furiously—as she looked at the pictures.

Brylee, the discarded bride, heartbroken and furious in her grandmother’s wedding gown.

Hutch, standing straight and tall and obviously miserable midway down the aisle, guests gawking on either side as he held up both hands in a gesture that plainly said, “Hold everything.”

The condolence party over at the Boot Scoot Tavern, Brylee wearing a sad expression and a T-shirt that said Men Suck.

Beware, murmured a voice in the back of Kendra’s mind.

But even then she knew she wouldn’t heed her own warning.

After all, what could happen in broad daylight, in a cemetery, with Madison and half the county right there?

CHAPTER FIVE

“DOES THIS SEEM a little weird to you?” Kendra asked Joslyn on Saturday morning as they helped Opal and a dozen other women set out tons of home-prepared food on the picnic tables at Pioneer Cemetery. “Holding what amounts to a party in a graveyard, I mean?”

Joslyn, who looked as though she might be having trouble keeping her center of gravity balanced, smiled and plunked herself down on one of the benches while the cheerful work went on around her. “I think it’s one of the best things about small towns,” she replied. “The way life and death are integrated—after all, they’re part of the same cycle, aren’t they? You can’t have one without the other.”

Thoughtful, Kendra scanned the surrounding area for Madison, something that came automatically to her now, and found her and Daisy industriously “helping” Hutch, Shea and several of the older girl’s friends from school pull weeds around a nearby scattering of very old graves. The water tower loomed in the distance, with its six-foot stenciled letters reading “Parable,” its rickety ladders and its silent challenge to every new generation of teenagers: Climb me.

“I guess you’re right,” Kendra said very quietly, though by then the actual substance of her friend’s remark had essentially slipped her mind. An instant later, though, at some small sound—a gasp, maybe—she turned to look straight at Joslyn.

Joslyn sat with one hand splayed against either side of her copiously distended stomach, her eyes huge with delighted alarm. “I think it’s time,” she said in a joyous whisper.

“Oh, my God,” Kendra replied, instantly panicked, stopping herself just short of putting a hand to her mouth.

Opal stepped up, exuding a take-charge attitude. “Now everybody, just stay calm,” she commanded. “Babies are born every second of every day in every part of the world, and this is going to turn out just fine.”

“G-get Slade,” Joslyn managed, smiling and wincing at the same time. “Please.”

No one had to go in search of Joslyn’s husband; he seemed to have sonar where his wife was concerned.

Kendra watched with relief as he came toward them, his strides long and purposeful, but calm and measured, too. He was grinning from ear to ear when he reached Joslyn and crouched in front of her, taking both her hands in his.

“Breathe,” he told her.

Joslyn laughed, nodded and breathed.

“It’s time, then?” he asked her, gruffly gentle. His strength was quiet and unshakable.

“Definitely,” Joslyn replied.

“Then let’s get this thing done,” Slade replied, straightening to his full height and easing Joslyn to her feet, supporting her in the curve of one steel-strong arm as they headed for the parking lot.

Opal took off her apron, thrust it into the hands of a woman standing nearby and hurried after them, taking her big patent leather purse with her.

Shea materialized at Kendra’s side with Madison and Daisy and leaned into her a little, her expression worried and faintly lost.

Kendra wrapped an arm around the teenage girl’s slender shoulders and squeezed. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she said softly. “Just like Opal said.”

“They forgot all about me,” Shea murmured, staring after her stepparents and Opal as they retreated.

“No, sweetheart,” Kendra said quickly. “They’re just excited because the baby’s coming and maybe a little scared, that’s all.”

Shea bit her lower lip, swallowed visibly, and rummaged up a small, tremulous smile. “A baby brother will be hard to compete with,” she reflected. “Especially since he really belongs to them and I don’t.”

Kendra knew Shea adored Slade—her mother, his ex-wife, was remarried and living in L.A.—and she also knew that Slade loved this girl as much as if he’d fathered her himself. And Joslyn loved her, too.

“You belong to them, too, Shea,” Kendra assured the girl. “Don’t forget that.”

Madison, perhaps sobered by Shea’s mood—the two had been hanging out together since Madison and Kendra had arrived with Hutch—slipped her hand into Kendra’s and looked up at her with wide, solemn eyes.

“Are babies better than big kids?” she asked very seriously.

Kendra’s heart turned over. “Babies are very special,” she answered carefully, “and so are the big kids they turn into.”

As she spoke, Hutch stepped into her line of sight, and something happened inside Kendra as she watched him watching Slade and Joslyn’s departing vehicle. Opal sat tall and stalwart in the backseat.

What was that look in his eyes? Worry, perhaps? Envy?

Back in high school, Kendra recalled, Joslyn had been Hutch’s first love and he hers. Most people had expected them to marry at some point, perhaps after college, but they’d grown apart instead, from a romantic standpoint at least. They had remained close friends.

She, Kendra, had been his second love.

Maybe that was why he hadn’t stepped in when she threw herself into an ill-fated relationship with Jeffrey Chamberlain, way back when. Possibly, letting her go had been easy because he hadn’t really been over Joslyn at that point.

In fact it could well be that he still wasn’t over her, even though she was happily married to his half brother and about to give birth to their first child.

Now you’re just being silly, Kendra scolded herself silently, straightening her spine and raising her chin. Besides, what did it matter who Hutch Carmody did or did not love? He’d hurt every woman he’d ever cared about—except Joslyn.

“Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?”

The question had come from Hutch and he was looking at Shea as he spoke. Although he and Slade were still working on being brothers, he was already an uncle to Shea and she was a niece to him.

Shea shook her head, slipped away from Kendra’s side and held out a hand to Madison. “The three-legged race is starting soon,” she said to the little girl. “Want to be my partner?”

Madison nodded eagerly and crowed, “Yes!” for good measure, in case there might be any ambiguity in the matter.

“Let’s go check out the prize table then,” Shea said. And just like that, they were off, racing through the grass, Daisy and Jasper, the Barlows’ dog, bounding after them.

“Slade and Joslyn do realize,” Kendra began, without really meaning to say anything at all, “that Shea is worried that they won’t love her as much once the baby is here?”

Hutch, standing nearer than she’d thought, replied quietly, “Slade and I may have our differences,” he said, “but the man is rock-solid when it comes to loving his family.” A pause followed, then a wistful, “Not a trait he learned from our dad.”

Picking up on the pain in his words, she looked at him directly.

They were essentially alone together, under those leafy, breeze-rustled trees, because everyone else had gone back to what they were doing before Joslyn had gone into labor—setting out food, pulling weeds, mowing grass, generally getting ready for the festivities that would follow on the heels of the cleanup effort.

Hutch, meanwhile, looked as though he regretted the remark about John Carmody, not because he hadn’t meant it, but because it revealed more than he wanted her or anyone else to know.

“Tell me about your dad,” Kendra said, pushing the envelope a little. She remembered the elder Carmody clearly, of course, but she hadn’t really known him. He’d been a grown-up, after all, and a reserved one at that, handsome like Slade and almost religious about minding his own business.

Hutch took her hand, and she let him, and they drifted away from the others to sit on rocks overlooking the town of Parable, nestled into the shallow valley below. “Not much to tell,” he said in belated reply to her earlier request. “The old man and I didn’t see eye to eye on most things, and he made it pretty plain that I didn’t measure up to his expectations.”

“But you loved him?”

“I loved him,” Hutch confirmed, staring out over the town, past the church steeples and the courthouse roof. “And I guess, in his own way, he probably loved me. Do you remember your dad, Kendra?”

She shook her head. “He was long gone by the time I was born,” she said.

Remarkably, as close as they’d been, she and Hutch hadn’t talked much about their childhoods. They’d been totally, passionately engrossed in the present.

Now Kendra thought about her mother, Sherry, beautiful and flaky and too footloose to raise a little girl on her own. In a moment, Kendra was right back there, like a time traveler, standing in the overgrown yard in front of her grandmother’s trailer, clutching Sherry’s fingers with one hand and gripping the handle of a toy suitcase in the other.

She’d been five years old at the time, only a few months older than Madison was now.

“I’ll be back soon, I promise,” she heard Sherry say as clearly as if a quarter of a century hadn’t passed since that summer day. “You just sit there on the porch like a good girl and wait for your grandma to get home from work. She’ll take care of you until I can come and get you.”

Maybe the suitcase, hastily purchased in a thrift store, should have been a clue about what was to come, but Kendra was, after all, a child and a trusting one at that. She hadn’t known she was being lied to, not consciously at least.

Most likely Sherry hadn’t known she was lying, either. Never mean, Sherry had always meant well. She just had trouble following through on her better intentions.

In the end, she’d leaned down, kissed Kendra on the top of her head, promised they’d be together again soon, this time for good. They’d get a house of their own and a dog and a nice car.

With that, Sherry waggled her fingers in farewell, climbed into her ancient, smoke-belching station wagon and drove away.

Kendra simply sat and waited—it wouldn’t have occurred to her to wander off or run after Sherry’s car.

When her grandmother arrived home a couple hours later, she got out of her car, lit up a cigarette and drew deeply on the smoke. Then she crossed the overgrown yard to stand there frowning down at Kendra.

With her bent and buckled plastic suitcase beside her, Kendra looked up into her grandmother’s lined and sorrow-hardened face, and saw no welcome there.

“Just what I need,” the old woman had said bitterly. “A kid to take care of.”

But Alva Shepherd had given Kendra a home, however reluctantly.

She’d put food on the table and kept a roof over their heads and if love and laughter had been lacking from the relationship, well, nobody had everything. If Sherry hadn’t dropped her off that day, she probably would have been killed in the car accident that took her mom’s life six months later.

After that, her grandma had been a little nicer to her, not out of compassion—she didn’t seem to grieve over losing a daughter or Kendra’s loss of her mother, apparently regarding it as a fitting end to a misspent life—but because Kendra became eligible for a small monthly check from the government. That made things easier all around.

“Kendra?” Hutch tugged her back into the here and now, still holding her hand.

“There are too many broken people in this world,” she said, thinking aloud.

Hutch simply gazed at her for a long, unreadable moment. “True enough,” he agreed finally, almost hoarsely. “But there are plenty of good ones, too, built to stay the course.”

Happy noises in the distance indicated that the games were about to start and picnic food was being served. Hutch was right, of course—these sturdy people all around them were the proof, teaming up to tend the grounds of a decrepit old cemetery, to serve potato salad and hot dogs and the like to old friends and new, to hold races for children who would remember sunny, communal days like this one well into their own old age.

In that moment, Kendra felt a wistful sort of hope that places like Parable would always exist, so babies could be born and grow up and get married and live on into their golden years, always in touch with their own histories and those of the people around them, always a part of something, always belonging somewhere.

It was what Kendra had wanted for Madison, that kind of stability, and what she wanted for herself, too—because her story hadn’t ended with her overwhelmed grandmother on the rickety porch of a double-wide that had, even then, seen better days. Because Opal had taken her into her heart and Joslyn had been the sister she’d never had, and the generous souls who called Parable home had taken her into their midst without hesitation, made her one of them.

Tears brimmed in her eyes.

Hutch, seeing them, stopped and cupped a hand under her chin. “What?” he asked with a tenderness that made Kendra’s breath catch.

“I was just thinking how perfect life is,” Kendra admitted, “even when it’s imperfect.”

He grinned. “It’s worth the trouble, all right,” he agreed. “Want to enter the three-legged race? I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be tied to at the ankle.”

She laughed and said yes, and threw herself headfirst into the celebration.

* * *

PARABLE COUNTY HOSPITAL was small, with brightly painted white walls, and most of the staff had been born and raised within fifty miles of the place, so folks felt safe when they were sick or hurt, knowing they’d be cared for by friends, or friends of friends, or even kinfolk.

Hutch hadn’t been there since his dad died, but now there was the baby boy, born a few hours before, ratcheting up the population by one. The numbers on the sign at the edge of town were magnetic, so they could be altered when somebody drew their first breath, sighed out their last one or simply moved to or from the community.

Slade, standing beside him, rested a hand briefly on his shoulder. After the races and the picnic and the prizes, he’d dropped Kendra and Madison and that goofy dog of theirs off at their new digs before heading home to shower, shave, put on clean clothes and make the drive back to town.

“You done good, brother,” Hutch said without looking at Slade.

Slade chuckled. He hadn’t taken his eyes off that little blue-bundled yahoo in the plastic baby bed since they’d stepped up to the window. “Thanks,” he replied, “but Joslyn deserves at least some of the credit. She handled the tough part.”

Hutch smiled, nodded. The kid hadn’t even been in the world for a full day and he was already looking more like John Carmody, as did Slade, by the second. He guessed it was the old man’s way of keeping one foot in the world, even though he was six feet under. “What are you going to call him?” he asked.

“Trace,” Slade answered, with a touch of quiet awe in his voice, as though he didn’t quite believe his own good fortune. “Trace Carmody Barlow.”

Hutch wasn’t prepared for the “Carmody” part. While Slade was technically as much a Carmody as Hutch himself was, their dad hadn’t raised him, hadn’t even claimed him until his will was read.

Slade interpreted his half brother’s silence accurately. “It’s a way of telling the truth,” he said. “About who Trace is and who I am.”

Hutch swallowed. Nodded. “How’s Joslyn?” he managed to ask.

“She’s ready to take the boy and head home to Windfall,” Slade said with another chuckle. “Opal and I overruled her, insisting that she spend the night here in the hospital, just to make sure she and the baby don’t run into any hitches.”

Windfall was the aptly chosen name of Slade and Joslyn’s ranch, which bordered Hutch’s land on one side. Slade had bought the spread with the proceeds from selling his share of Whisper Creek to Hutch and, as convoluted as the situation had been, Hutch would always be grateful. He was a part of that ranch and it was a part of him, and losing half of it would have been like being chopped into two pieces himself.

“I see you brought Kendra and her little girl to the cleanup today,” Slade remarked lightly.

Hutch looked straight at him. “Some first date, huh?” he joked, not that it actually was a first date, considering that he and Kendra had once been a couple. “A picnic at a cemetery.”

Slade grinned. “I took Joslyn to a horse auction the first time we went out,” he reminded Hutch. “Maybe chivalry runs in the family.”

“Or maybe not,” Hutch said, and they both laughed. Shook hands.

“Thanks for showing up to have a look at the boy,” Slade said.

Hutch nodded, said a quiet goodbye and turned to go while Slade stayed behind to admire his son for a little while longer.

Shea and Opal were standing in the corridor when Hutch got there, talking quietly with a beaming Callie Barlow.

“That’s one fine little brother you’ve got there,” he told Shea.

Apparently over her earlier angst at no longer being the only bird in the nest, Shea smiled brightly and nodded in happy agreement. Callie hugged her step-granddaughter, her own eyes full of tears.

“He’s the best,” Shea murmured.

“Congratulations,” Hutch said to Callie. It was, if he recalled correctly, the first word he’d ever said to the woman, even though he’d always known her. It wasn’t that he’d judged her—he supposed she’d loved the old man once upon a time, since she’d had a child with him—but Hutch’s mother’s heartache and rage over the affair was still fresh in his mind. Until Trace, acknowledging Callie would have seemed like an act of disloyalty to his mom, as crazy as that sounded. After all, she’d died when he was twelve.