Marriage By Necessity Read online

  Sonny shook his head. “You’re a good-looking woman, with a big heart and a working ranch. You’ve had offers—I know you have. You could have found yourself a real husband. Someone who would have stood by you.”

  “I didn’t want just someone. I only wanted Nate. And for a little while, I had him.” She put her hand on her stomach cherishingly. “And there will be a baby. Nate’s baby. It’s not everything I dreamed of. But it’s a lot closer than I ever thought I was going to get.”

  Sonny and Farrah exchanged baffled glances.

  Meggie smiled. “I know you don’t understand. And that’s okay. I just want you to know that I am fine. That we’re going to keep the Double-K. That in the spring, you’ll have a new niece or nephew. I hope that you’ll help me to raise him—or her—right.”

  Of course they promised that they would.

  A bit later, Meggie returned to her own house. In spite of her exhaustion after the long flight home, she stayed awake late. She missed Nate’s warmth beside her. And the wind was up, beating around the eaves, making a haunted, crying, lonely sound.

  The next morning, born rancher that she was, Meggie rose in the dark. She made a fire and drank her tea and watched the winter sun lift its face slowly to light the new day.

  A week later, Meggie received her first letter from Dolores. It read: “Your husband is gone. Off on one of those jobs of his. And when he his here, I do not talk to him. I give him looks like dirt. Did you know that my own grandmother was a bruja, a woman of magic? Maybe I will do something ugly, with chickens. He will suffer. And then he will beg you to return to him....”

  Meggie shot a letter back, commanding Dolores to do no such thing.

  Dolores replied that she had only been joking. She was a modern Catholic woman, after all, and not superstitious in the least.

  After that, the letters went back and forth. Meggie tried to write once a week and Dolores did the same. Meggie loved reading all the gossip, how Edie’s son had tried to make her move to a rest home, but Edie had steadfastly refused.

  Community Watch was still going strong. “We meet every two weeks,” Dolores wrote. “I usually make the cookies. No one is attacking us, so I think we must be doing the job right. And I learned some hot gossip. Mr. Hector Leverson goes very often to a café on Sunset. You know the one I mean. It is called Dave’s and we both know who is the head waitress there....”

  Christmas came and went. Meggie, Sonny, Farrah and the kids spent it together. On the Sunday before New Year’s, Meggie saw Cash and Abby at church in town.

  Abby took Meggie aside and spoke frankly, as Abby tended to do. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

  “Am I getting that big?”

  “Well, it does show. But you look good—Oh, Meggie. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I want this baby.”

  “I don’t mean about the baby. You know what I mean. Nate.” Abby groaned. “He is hopeless. Worse than Cash was, I think. And Cash was pretty bad, let me tell you. He ran away from happiness as fast as he could. You don’t want to know what I went through with him. I’ll spare you the details, but it was bad. Very bad. And Nate’s a lot like Cash, really. Oh, I know. Nate’s got that bad-boy thing going. And Cash was always everyone’s knight in shining armor. But I mean, Cash lost his mother when he was twelve. And Nate lost his father when he was fourteen. And both of them ended up pretty much orphans, since the parent they had left dumped them off at the ranch. So my theory is, they’re both terrified to love.” Abby laughed. “You’re looking kind of cross-eyed, Meggie. I’m talking too much, huh?” She frowned. “But all kidding aside, Nate didn’t even come home for Christmas this year. That’s a bad sign. He always comes home for that, at least. To tell you the truth, we’re all a little worried.”

  Meggie offered the reassurance Abby seemed to be seeking. “He’s all right. I keep in touch with his landlady. She says he’s working a lot, but he’s fine.”

  “Well. Good. I guess. Oh, Meggie. I know he loves you. He’s always loved you.”

  “He wants his freedom.”

  “He is a complete fool.”

  Before they said goodbye, Meggie remembered to congratulate Abby on her recent graduation, with honors, from the University of Colorado.

  Abby smiled her thanks and then told Meggie that Tess DeMarley’s mother had died. Tess was housemate to Abby’s mother, Edna. “Poor Tess. She had to spend her Christmas in Rapid City, taking care of all the funeral arrangements.”

  Meggie made a mental note to send Tess a condolence card.

  “But the good news,” Abby said, “is that Zach finally asked Tess out.”

  Meggie smiled at that. Everyone in town knew that Zach Bravo had had his eye on the pretty widow who looked after Abby’s mother. They’d all been waiting for him to make his move. And now, at last, he had.

  “They’ll end up married—just you wait,” Abby predicted.

  Meggie saw no reason to disagree.

  In the first weeks of the new year, Meggie spent her days getting feed to the stock and her nights trying not to give in to depression. She did pretty well, actually. The baby helped. When things seemed loneliest, she would put her hand on her growing stomach and think loving thoughts of the life she would share with her new little one. Soon enough, she would find herself smiling, feeling that things weren’t so bad after all.

  Dolores wrote faithfully, alternately praising her grandchildren and complaining about them, reporting all the news from her two apartment buildings. In every letter, she made some mention of Nate:

  He is doing fine, that man of yours. As fine as he deserves to do, staying all alone and acting like he hates the world....

  Yesterday, he came down to pay the rent. He tried to stick the money where the mail goes. But I am watching for him. I pull open the door and give him a big, mean smile. “Good morning, Mr. Bravo,” I say to him. “And how are you doing lately?” He coughs and looks very scared. He should be scared. I am thinking bad thoughts about him. “I’m just fine, Dolores,” he tells me. And then he sticks out the check. “Here. The rent.” “Thank you, Mr. Bravo,” I say, so polite. He turns to go and I say to his back, so sweet I know it makes shivers down his spine, “You take good care of yourself now.”

  Meggie, I can promise you. A little chicken blood and a few words of power and that man will come running to your side. Just kidding. Ha-ha....

  January faded into February. Meggie was six months pregnant and serious winter feeding of the stock was well under way. Mostly, Meggie drove the vehicles, leaving the heavy lifting to Sonny as much as she could. Dr. Pruitt, who ran the clinic in town, warned Meggie to start thinking about the baby more.

  “You’re coming to the point where you’ll just have to back off a little,” he said.

  “Come on, Doc. It’s almost calving time.”

  “Hire an extra man or two. And talk to Farrah. Maybe you’ll have to take over some of the work close to home and let her go out with Sonny to look after the herd.”

  That night, Meggie sat down with her cousin and his wife. She laid out the doctor’s orders. Farrah declared that she’d do her best to fill Meggie’s boots, even though she’d never be the rancher Meggie was. They decided that when calving time came, Meggie would handle the cooking for everyone and look after the kids. Farrah would take over Meggie’s work as best she could and Sonny would work even harder than usual, to pick up the slack.

  Meggie put out the word that she could use an extra hand, but it was the dead of winter and cowboying didn’t pay much. She just hoped someone worth hiring would show up in the next month or two.

  On the fifteenth of February, Edna Heller and Tess DeMarley threw Meggie a surprise baby shower at Edna’s house in town. Abby came, too, of course, and so did Farrah, plus a couple of women Meggie had known since her school days. They played silly games and ate cake and punch.

  Edna clucked over Meggie constantly through the party, asking her if she was feeling all right, fetching her
pillows to support her back—and muttering complaints about Nate under her breath.

  Meggie opened the brightly wrapped packages to find a full layette from Edna, a set of receiving blankets from Tess and a windup swing from Abby. Sonny had already made her a changing table, but still there was a gift from Farrah, too.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Meggie told her cousin’s wife.

  “Oh, yes, I should.”

  Inside the box was a handmade quilt, mittens and a hat. “Oh, Farrah. They’re beautiful.”

  Farrah smiled in pleasure at Meggie’s obvious delight in her gift.

  When she got home, Meggie took the new things up to the room next to her own, which she’d been fixing up for the baby over the last few weeks. Meggie put the tiny shirts and soft rompers away in the bureau, struck with wonder at the thought that in a few months, her baby would be wearing them.

  The cold, dreary days went by. Meggie still went out with Sonny. But the time drew steadily nearer when she would have to switch places with Farrah and do a ranch wife’s work—not an easy job, by any means. But at least Farrah’s work didn’t include things like pulling cows from frozen streams. Even driving the pickup was something Meggie would have to give up soon; her stomach was starting to get in the way of the wheel.

  Meggie did worry that when calving time came, they’d have more work to do than hands to do it; yet still, a kind of peace had settled over her. A fullness. An acceptance. That she and her family would get by, one way or another. That her baby would be born and life would go on.

  She looked for beauty where she could find it. And even on the dreariest days, beauty managed to find her.

  One freezing evening at the very end of February, Meggie came in alone at dark. Sonny had knocked off early and taken Farrah and the kids into Buffalo for a visit with Farrah’s mom, who ran a motel there.

  As Meggie climbed from the pickup, seven hungry heifers bawled at her from the corral. They were close to their calving time, well ahead of the rest of the herd. Meggie and Sonny had put them in the corral so they could keep a close eye on them. Meggie grinned at the sound of them. She felt a real affinity with them lately; like them, she was big and ungainly and getting close to her time.

  Crusted snow crunched under her boots as she tossed the heifers hay and grain cake, a process that took her much longer than it used to. Her back ached a little and her growing stomach slowed her down. Plus, she tried to be careful not to hurt herself or the baby whenever she attempted heavy work.

  When the heifers had their feed, Meggie leaned on the corral rail for a minute, watching, listening to them crunch on the cake, feeling the cold down to her bones, but feeling kind of peaceful, too. The sky overhead was studded with stars—stars that always looked so much brighter, somehow, in the winter.

  The chinook, a warm southern wind, came up as Meggie leaned there watching the heifers. It blew in the way it always did, seemingly from nowhere, to warm the winter world. Meggie sighed and smiled. She closed her eyes and let the warmth whip at her, swirling around her, feeling the temperature rise and the winter cold retreat.

  The melting snow had started dripping from the eaves and cutting tiny rivulets in the blanket of white on the ground by the time she went inside. Meggie ate and got ready for bed smiling, as the chinook blew around the house, rattling the windows and making the roof creak.

  She dreamed of a night, years and years ago, when she’d stood in the yard and, like tonight, a chinook had blown in, wild and warm, to thaw the frozen world of winter. That night Meggie had seen the aurora borealis: the fabulous many-colored northern lights. The chinook had whipped around her, pulling at her jacket and playing with her hair, and the great pipes of shimmering color had come alive in the north sky, long, leaping tubes of light, jumping high and fading down, waterfalls of pure color, dancing against the darkness of the night.

  In her dream, Meggie lived it all again. And it seemed as if the rising towers of colored light were blown by the warm wind, pushed higher by the gusts of the chinook.

  In her dream, she tipped her head to the sky, smiling. And she felt a hand slide into her own. She whispered, “Nate,” and heard him gently answer, “Meggie.”

  And she woke, suddenly, alone in the bed that had been her father’s.

  Outside, the wind still blew. And the sound of Nate’s voice was in it, warm and tender and full of all the promises she had longed for that he would never make to her. She rested her hand on the pregnant swell of her belly, turned her head and closed her eyes, hoping to slip back into the same dream.

  But Nate and the dream of the northern lights had faded to memory. Only the roundness beneath her hand, the promise of the life he’d given into her care, remained.

  By the next morning, the chinook had blown itself out. The deep, hard snow of the night before had melted down to patches on the wet, cold ground. A blizzard moved in that night, turning the world into a blur of flying white. By the time the blizzard moved on, the snow lay thick and white on the land once more.

  In the first weeks of March, the heifers started to calve. Meggie had no choice by then but to stay close to the house, cooking and watching the kids and hand-feeding any calves too premature or ill to suck. The heifers they’d worried about, the ones they’d kept in the corral, had dropped their calves and been let out to pasture by the second week of March.

  By the third week of March, the older cows started to calve. A good portion of the Double-K became one huge maternity ward. Sonny and Farrah were out every morning before dawn, trying to keep track of births that ranged over several thousand acres, to get to any cows that were having trouble, to help any calves that had gotten separated from their mothers in the spring storms that blew across the prairie, full of cold, blinding fury, driving the cows before the wind.

  If possible, they brought the problems home to Meggie in the bed of a pickup, or even slung over the front of a saddle. She helped the weak ones eat and treated the sick ones as best she could. But she felt useless, so big and ungainly now, leaving her cousin and his wife to do the rough work, pulling calves in open pastures, catching the little critters to put on the dehorning paste, finding the lost calves and the dead ones, grafting the orphans onto cows that had lost their own. It went on and on. And Meggie cooked and doctored, went in for supplies and watched the kids and wished her baby had been born months ago so she could get out and do her share in this season when the Double-K needed her the most.

  Zach came by on horseback the last Saturday in March, which was the day before Easter. Meggie’s heart seemed to expand in her chest at the sight of him. Maybe he would have news of Nate.

  But he only said he’d been checking the cows in a pasture that bordered the Double-K and decided to stop in and see how she was getting along. His eyes widened when he looked at the size of her stomach, but he was too well mannered to say anything about how big she’d grown.

  Meggie had a pot of minestrone soup warming on the back burner of the stove. She served him a bowl.

  Since they’d been friends for so long, she felt comfortable ribbing him a little about Tess DeMarley. “I hear the two of you have been seen around town.”

  “Tess is a good woman,” he said quietly.

  “And a pretty one.”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  “And I hear she knows ranch life. And loves it.”

  “You heard right.”

  “Some other man will snap her up, Zach. Don’t drag your heels.”

  He pretended to glare at her. “Meggie, don’t crowd a man.”

  She laughed and let the subject drop. Zach had been hurt pretty bad once when it came to love. It made sense he wouldn’t be rushed the second time around.

  “Good soup,” he said, and then smiled wryly. “Maybe you ought to sell this place. You can come on over and cook for me.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Just hoping out loud.”

  Zach’s never-ending quest to find someone to replace Edna Heller wa
s getting to be something of a joke to everyone who knew him. Meggie asked, “So who’s cooking over at the Rising Sun now?”

  “Her name’s Angie Iberlin. She’s a widow, in her fifties. Her biscuits could sink a battleship, but she’s not half-bad at keeping the place clean. And she’s polite. That’s a real plus in someone who answers your phone, believe me.”

  “So you’re saying that she’s working out?”

  “I’m saying I haven’t done better since Edna left. Just cross your fingers this one will last.”

  She almost teased him a little more about Tess. After all, if he married Tess, he’d have his housekeeping problem solved. Everyone said that Tess DeMarley was a model of womanly accomplishment. But Meggie thought she’d probably teased Zach enough for the time being. So she kept her peace. Instead of Tess DeMarley, they spoke of the eight bred heifers that had been rustled off the Rising Sun just a month before. Zach said they still hadn’t a clue as to who had committed the theft. Meggie wished she could reassure her friend that the theives would be caught in the end. But it didn’t look likely at that point, and she and Zach both knew it.

  “You doing all right over here?” he asked just before he got up to go.

  “I’ve got Farrah and Sonny. We’re managing.”

  “Maybe you ought to take on an extra hand, just for the next few weeks, until calving season’s past.”

  “I’ve put the word out, but so far, nobody’s knocking down my door.”

  “I’ll check around for you.”

  She thanked him and then walked him back out to his horse. As she watched him prepare to mount, her heart set up a clamor in her chest. Each beat seemed to echo a name: Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate, tempting her, taunting her to ask after the husband she hadn’t seen in months. If she was going to ask, it must be now, before Zach rode away.

  “Zach?”

  “Yeah?”