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“I’ll be more miserable without him. Right, Sarah?” Leigh asked of her daughter, who was looking up at her with what appeared to be an approving smile. “We’d be miserable and lost without him, wouldn’t we?”
“Then I wash my hands of the whole affair,” Lois said. “Don’t expect me”
“No one expects anything out of you, Lois. Now shut up.”
Lois gawked at her husband, her mouth working with mute wrath. She cast another venomous look toward her daughter, who met her gaze levelly until Lois looked away. Finally she sat straight forward in her seat, perfectly erect, righteously indignant.
“Thank you, Father,” Leigh said, scrambling out of the back seat as soon as he pulled the car to a stop.
Harve Jackson retrieved her luggage from the trunk of the car and set it on the front steps of the house. “Leigh, for better or worse, Chad’s your husband. You’re doing the right thing.”
“Yes, I know.” She kissed her father on the cheek. Leaning forward, she spoke through the window. “Goodbye, Mother.” She got no answer, but then she hadn’t expected one. Her mother would come around. Lois’s fits of sulking seldom lasted long.
When Leigh turned away after waving her parents off, the Dillons were waiting at the door for her. Amelia was smiling br
oadly and came to relieve Leigh of Sarah. Stewart apologized for not being able to help her with her bags. His trouser leg was empty as he leaned upon his crutch. She hastened to get inside.
Over Amelia’s protests, Leigh helped her clear away what the caterer hadn’t done. “I told them all—caterer, florist, everyone—to come back tomorrow,” Amelia said. “Because of Chad’s leaving, they all understood.”
They were rinsing out punch glasses in the kitchen. Stewart was watching the last of the New Year’s Day football games and entertaining Sarah on his lap.
“I let Chad down, Amelia,” Leigh said quietly. “When he needed my support the most, I didn’t give it. He must be so disappointed in me.”
“He understands and he loves you, Leigh, and despite how you acted before he left, he knows you love him.”
Wanting so badly to believe that, Leigh turned to her mother-in-law with anxious eyes. “Do you think so?”
Amelia patted her on the hand. “I know so. I won’t be a meddlesome in-law and butt in where I’m not wanted, but I’m a good listener if you want to talk about it.”
* * *
The courage she had found within herself was tested when Leigh saw the news reports of the fire in Venezuela on network television. It was such a horrendous inferno, such a rapacious drain on the fuel supply it was consuming, that it had made headlines worldwide.
Thankfully Leigh was able to busy herself at the mall for several days, taking down the Christmas decorations and overseeing their storage. The person she had recruited to take care of her work while she was away on her honeymoon had been called out of town the day after New Year’s. The pots of flowers used to replace the now-wilting poinsettias were delivered and had to be arranged in the beds.
The residents of Saddle Club Estates were each responsible for taking down and storing their own decorations. Leigh hired two students to help her with those at Chad’s house. Using her key, she showed them where to store them in a closet inside the garage. While she waited for them, she stood beside the pickup parked inside, running her hands over the faded, chipped paint, remembering.
The evenings were the hardest. Amelia was delighted that she was getting to watch Sarah throughout the day, though Leigh had offered to take her to the sitter she used in town. Such a suggestion was met with a deluge of protests. Stewart seemed not at all disconcerted to have two new females under his roof, but went about his business of running the cattle ranch seemingly unaffected.
Feeding his vast herd became a challenge when a blizzard blew in from New Mexico and left frigid temperatures and twelve inches of snow behind. Not prepared to handle more than a few inches of snow at a time, the west Texas community came to a standstill. Highways were closed; schools and businesses got an unexpected holiday; anybody with common sense stayed indoors.
During the second day of confinement, Amelia and Leigh were in the kitchen making fudge. Stewart had come in near-frozen after he and his hands had distributed bales of hay to the herd. He was watching television in the living room, eagerly awaiting the fudge.
“Leigh, Chad will love you forever if you learn how to do this. That boy can eat a pound of this himself,” Amelia said as she dropped a dollop of the cooking fudge into a measuring cup of cold water. “Now watch, this is the tricky part. You have to make sure it’s hard”
“Leigh, Amelia, come here quick,” Stewart called from the living room. His urgency was transmitted to them and the fudge was forgotten as they dashed down the hallway. Leigh’s first thought was that something had happened to Sarah, but one sweeping glance of the room told her the infant was still sleeping on a pallet.
“Stew” Amelia began only to be interrupted.
“Shhhh. Listen,” Stewart said, pointing to the television screen.
The news reporter with a map of Venezuela behind his left shoulder was telling of a new development on the fire that had raged out of control for more than a week.
“Efforts to put out the fire have proved futile for the experts of Flameco. Today the situation became even more grim when another storage tank holding thousands of barrels of crude exploded. The storage tank is positioned in a group of others, making the situation critical. Safety doesn’t permit our reporters to get any closer than two miles from the site, so details are sketchy at this point.
“Rumors that several men were injured as a result of the explosion have come in, but identities of the injured or the extent of their injuries have not been confirmed. We’ll keep you abreast of the situation as details are made known to us. Now back to our regular programming.”
Stewart used the remote-control switch to snap off the sound. Leigh watched transfixed as a woman won a new refrigerator and jumped up and down exuberantly, kissing the host of the inane game show and all but choking him with his microphone cord. To Leigh, there was something obscene in jubilation over winning a new refrigerator when men could be burned, injured… dying.
