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“We’ve got to go after him,” he said, looking frantically from Wyatt to Grayson to Samuel. “I know his spots. I think I know where he could have gone off to.”
He’d turned to leave, but Samuel grabbed his arm and stopped him, shaking his head in disapproval.
“Samuel’s right,” I said. “We’ll let the police handle it.”
To which, Wyatt motioned to Lincoln and said under his breath, “Looks like the police are busy handling other things.”
A minute later, I was standing at the doorway of Lincoln’s house trying to keep Lincoln from going out and Wyatt from coming in, caught in between a barrage of threats the two of them were throwing at each other. Ryder took up Lincoln’s side, and Teddy and Grayson took up Wyatt’s. Only Samuel stood off to the side, seeming bemused by the whole scene.
“You going to help me, Samuel?” I said.
He lifted his shoulders. “I figure this was inevitable. Didn’t you see this coming?”
“No, I didn’t!” I yelled, putting an abrupt stop to the back and forth posturing between Lincoln and Wyatt. “No, I didn’t expect any fighting. What the hell’s wrong with you guys!?”
After a moment of silence, Samuel said, “You’ve got to choose.”
“Choose? Why do I have to choose?”
“Yeah,” said Wyatt. “I thought we had something going, you and I.”
“We did,” I said.
“Did?”
“Do,” I said quickly, trying to shake the confusion from my head. “I don’t know. I thought we had something too. But now you’re freaking out like you own me. I don’t know. But I know that I’m not choosing one of you over the other. I’m not playing favorites. Last time I did that my friend was killed.”
I pushed Wyatt out of the way and ran to my house. If they wanted to stay there and fight over me, so be it. I wasn’t going to try and stop them. But I wasn’t going to choose one and reject the others. I’d been living with the guilt and sorrow of a decision like that for too long now not to know better.
So, instead, I ran home, ate chocolate, and took a long hot shower.
Rodeo boys can be such drama queens.
My mom and dad returned from their trip to Colorado. [19] The three of us sat at the dinner table, with the fine china before us, folded napkins on our laps, and polite conversation on our tongues. “So, tell me all about New York? How long will you be staying in Magnolia? Have you had a chance to do any riding since you’ve been back?”
It was all so surreal as if I were watching a parody of my life being played out on a stage set to look like my childhood home. The actors looked like my mom and dad, talked like them, but they were just playing their roles, and all of it felt badly scripted.
I had to remind myself that the last few days had, in actuality, really happened, that I had experienced love and had let it carry me away only to lose it as quickly as I’d found it. That part wasn’t the dream. This Sunday dinner with my parents was the dream. And it was as fake as the butter substitute on our dinner rolls that my mom had set out because of my dad’s high cholesterol.
I knew my lines. I knew what the other actors wanted me to say. And I delivered them with rehearsed precision—rather convincing, in my humble opinion.
The phone rang and interrupted our charade.
“Who calls at this hour on a Sunday?” my dad said, offended by the inconsiderate intrusion.
My mom answered. “It’s for you, Ruby. It’s someone from the hospital,” she said more as a question than a statement.
I hadn’t told them what had happened to Gran and me. That wasn’t part of the script.
I took the call in the kitchen. I didn’t say much, just listened.
“Your grandmother’s doing fine,” said the woman on the line. “We’re sending her home now. In fact, in a way, the attack she suffered was a good thing. It made us run some tests and we were able to find a tumor in its early stages.”
“My goodness,” I gasped.
“That’s good news. We found it in time to do something about it. Another month or two, we wouldn’t have been so lucky.”
“Um, that is good news, then,” I said.
“And there’s more news. We ran tests on you too, of course.”
“And?”
“Did you know that you’re pregnant?”
Somehow, I managed to finish the phone conversation and make it back to the dinner table. Though, I have no recollection of that. One minute I was on the phone being told I was pregnant, the next I was seated at the table asking my dad to pass the mashed potatoes.
“Who was that on the phone?” asked my dad. “What did they want? Why is someone from the hospital calling you? Did you go to the hospital? Are you okay? Is there anything we need to know about?”
