Sweet Return by Anna Jeffrey

Author:Anna Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-06-15T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Dalton started his Monday at the Wacker County Courthouse, writing a check that paid the taxes on the Parker ranch. When he had called his business manager in LA last night to arrange for the money to be transferred into his checking account, the guy had given him a stern lecture about paying taxes on real estate he didn’t own. But at the moment, Dalton saw no other choice.

From there he crossed the street to Hatlow Farmers Bank. A plaque beside the front door marked it as a Texas historical building. The bank had been founded in the nineteenth century and the hundred-year-old red limestone building had obviously been maintained to reflect its American Victorian-era history. Dalton delivered a copy of the receipt from the tax assessor’s office showing the taxes paid current on the Parker ranch. The Hispanic employee who took it couldn’t have cared less about a ranch that was as much a Texas historical landmark as the bank. Ironic, he thought.

Leaving the courthouse square and driving along Hatlow’s main street, he saw the aftermath of a collapsed economy. What had once been a thriving Norman Rockwell-ish small town, supported by oil and agriculture, was now a dilapidating shell of buildings and stores with boarded-up windows and locked doors. Mom had told him the landscape was the same all over West Texas. Depressing to see the site of his youth in decay.

Before Dalton graduated from high school in 1987, the price of oil had already plummeted. Small oil operators had already started to disappear from the Hatlow business scene. Though he had witnessed the ruinous event at its genesis, he could see that the impact of the economic crash hadn’t fully manifested itself until after his departure.

But more than depressed oil prices affected Hatlow, according to his mother. Cotton farming had changed. Many farmers found it easier and more profitable to let their fields lie fallow in return for government checks. Ranching had fared only slightly better than farming, but most of the cattle operations were still hanging on. The American public could do without American cotton, but they did love their American beef.

Oh, well, he told himself. At least no one had to fear a sniper hidden behind one of the darkened second-floor windows. No suicide bombers would be showing up in the grocery store or the schoolhouse. Not yet.

He soon came to a flower shop located on the outskirts of downtown in a Hatlow version of a strip mall. He ordered a bouquet to be delivered to his mother, folded the receipt for the taxes into a small square and inserted it into a gift card to be attached to the bouquet. He requested that the flowers be delivered today.

When he left the flower shop, he carried a pink four-foot-tall teddy bear wearing a white lacy bow around its neck. It was left over from Valentine’s Day, the shop owner had told him. He still pondered the fact that his mother hadn’t said a damn word about Lane being the father of a small daughter.

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