Crazy For Trying by Joni Rodgers

Author:Joni Rodgers [Rodgers, Joni]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Stella Link
Published: 2011-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

“Well, don’t you look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” Berryl said.

A little while after he dropped Tulsa off at the house, Mac was comfortably saddled up on a barstool at the Joker’s Wild.

“Hey, Mac, how is it?” Yak was playing the jovial bartender. “What have you been up to this weekend?”

“Oh... split a couple cords of wood,” Mac said for his own amusement, but Ben Sharkey was sitting just down the bar, and it didn’t get past him. He fr-frmphed and brought his beer over, reaching out a ratchety hand to nudge Mac’s shirt pocket. Mac proffered the pack of Camels, but they both noticed there was only one left.

“It’s yours, Shark-man,” he shrugged. Ben took it, looking expectantly at Mac over the flame of a Cricket lighter, but Mac wasn’t talking, so they just leaned their flannel elbows on the bar and sipped from their heavy glass mugs, and Ben watched his old friend looking satisfied and foolish; a man who’d been laid like the Last Iron Mile. Mac drank only one beer and a shot of Jack and actually paid for them before he left.

“This must be serious,” Berryl called after him.

Hopping into the rolling truck, he found the Patsy Cline tape still in the deck and turned it up loud as if he were a kid cruising. He was tempted to turn back up Benton and knock on her door, but he knew she needed to sleep, and he needed to get back to the ranch and do a few things. He had decided to take on a couple of horses so he could teach Tulsa to ride (she’d be a natural, Mac figured, with those milelong legs of hers), but that meant putting in some serious fence work and finally facing the stable—either to repair it or tear it down. It also meant haggling with old man Chadwick over the docile white mare for Tulsa and, he hoped, something more spirited for himself. He pulled onto the Chadwicks’ access road instead of going to his own gate. That’s another thing, he decided then and there. The old gate had to go. Mac wanted one like the Chadwicks’, with a hewn log arch and a hanging sign. It would say “White Feather Ranch” instead of the plain “R. MacPeters” that was scrawled on the mailbox now.

When Mac pulled up to the yard, Mrs. Chadwick was hanging out her wash and her husband was driving off on a John Deere tractor mower.

“Hello!” she called, and Mac waved. She invited him in and brought out cookies as if he were still the ten-year-old they hired for odd jobs. “Well, this is such a lovely surprise. I was just saying to Dad that we should look in on you down there.”

Mrs. Chadwick was the kind of woman ranchers are supposed to marry. She was sturdy now and could have been called strapping when she was younger. She could do a man’s work when she had to but was always a wife.

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