The Husband School Read online

  “You called me. What do you mean, you’re not talking about it?”

  Meg started to laugh. “Luce, I’m not pregnant. But I have a kid here who is, and she fainted and then the bus left and Jerry called Hip and now I need help.”

  “Hip? What would he know about pregnant women?” Meg heard the sound of pleading from Lucia’s youngest. “In a minute. Find your boots—the red ones—and get your backpack. Sorry about that, Meg. We’re getting ready to go to Mama’s for lunch.”

  “Lasagna or chicken parm?”

  “Chicken parm.”

  “Nice.” That was an understatement. Lucia had lucked out when she’d married Mama’s only son. “That’s okay, I won’t keep you long. I just needed advice.”

  “You’re not going to get a whole lot from Hip.”

  Meg agreed. “That’s the point. And I don’t know what to do with her. She’s stranded. And she won’t let anyone drive her to the hospital or the clinic.”

  “You said kid. How old is she?”

  “Eighteen, but she looks younger than that.”

  “How pregnant?”

  “Enough to look pregnant, but awfully thin.”

  There was silence as Lucia thought this over. “I’ll just bet she hasn’t had any prenatal care. Where’s she going?”

  “She’s looking for her boyfriend. Except she doesn’t know where he is or what his last name is...so I’m not thinking she has a great chance of finding him. Montana’s a pretty big place to begin looking for a guy named Sonny.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Can you talk her into staying and seeing the doctor tomorrow? She’s going to need vitamins and blood tests and an ultrasound. Unless you can get her a lift to Lewistown. She could pick up the bus again there, but she’d be better off seeing a doctor first. And anyway, if she doesn’t know where to look for him, where does she plan to get to on the bus? This is as good a place to search as any.”

  Meg peered around the corner to see snow starting to fall outside the windows. “I’ll try to convince her, but you might have better luck with that.”

  “I’ll come by after lunch.”

  “I hoped you would. Thanks.”

  “You sound a little stressed,” her friend said. “Is something else going on?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ll tell you about later. Say hi to Mama for me.”

  * * *

  “WOULD SOMEONE TELL me why MacGregor is back?”

  Meg refilled coffee cups as the conversation whirled around her. Those who’d stuck around after Hip left were only to happy to update the men who’d arrived for lunch and missed all the action. Fortunately the customers trickled in slowly and Meg could keep up with the orders.

  “I don’t think he’s back, you know, permanently.”

  “Ed died in that storm last March.”

  “You’re way behind the times. He’s been at the big place for weeks now. Hasn’t hired anybody new, though, not that I heard.”

  “You think he’s gonna move that grizzly?”

  “Hip said he asked about carving a new base for it. Old one’s been cracked for years, since the kids moved it.”

  “His old man just about had a cow over that.”

  “Mick wasn’t real happy, either.”

  “Can I get a cheeseburger?”

  “What’s the soup today? It’s not up on the board yet.”

  “Man, oh, man, it was a big one. Yeah, sure, more coffee, thanks.”

  “They didn’t find Ed’s body for three days.”

  “This sure is a noisy place.” Shelly Smith, perched on a stool at the counter, sipped a cup of tea and waited for Al to grill a toasted cheese sandwich.

  Meg couldn’t argue with that. She set another glass of milk in front of the teenager. “It’s been an exciting morning here in town. I guess there’s lots to talk about.”

  “Like me?” She looked scared, which made Meg wonder what else the girl was hiding.

  “Probably not, with you sitting right here.” She smiled, to show she was teasing. “Missing the bus isn’t exactly big news. And you seem to be feeling a lot better, so they’ve gone on to other topics of conversation.”

  “I’m not sick,” the girl insisted. “I feel pretty stupid.”

  “About what?”

  She shrugged. “Is this a motel, too?”

  “It was, but not anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  Meg could read the problem on the young woman’s face as clearly as if she was reading a book: How was she supposed to survive on the few dollars she had in her purse? She had nowhere to stay, very little money and the snow had started to stick on the roads. If anyone could be called a “lost soul,” it was this young woman. Meg hesitated, but only for a moment, before offering a solution. She couldn’t let a pregnant stranger wander off into the snow, and she couldn’t spend the night sleeping in a booth in the restaurant. “You can spend the night in my mother’s cabin. She’s in Arizona.”

  Shelly stared at her, blue eyes wide with hope and relief. “Seriously?”

  “You have another plan?”

  She shook her head. “I’m totally out of plans.” She thought for a second. “Your mom won’t care? You’d do that?”

  “If you promise not to run off before you see the doctor tomorrow. He’s here every Tuesday.”

  “MacGregor—” George raised his voice to be heard over the clatter of lunch dishes “—must have something on his mind, something goin’ on, to come into town on a Monday morning and order breakfast as if he was in here every single day.”

  Meg silently agreed. From the little she’d heard, Owen had come to the ranch after his uncle died, but no one knew exactly why. His real life, according to an occasional newspaper article, was in Washington, DC.

  Into the sudden silence, Shelly leaned forward. “Mr. MacGregor is the guy who went through my bag?”

  “Because I asked him to.”

  She rolled her eyes. “He’d better not have taken anything.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “You must get a lot of people passing through here.”

  Meg took two hamburger plates from the pass and delivered them to customers at the other end of the counter before returning to Shelly. “Mostly in the summer. Fall and winter it quiets right down. The slow season starts now.”

  “Are there jobs?”

  “Why? Are you thinking about staying here for a while?”

  Shelly shrugged. “Maybe. Do you need a waitress? I worked at a Dairy Queen in Boise.”

  “Maybe,” Meg said, seeing a way to keep an eye on the girl until she could find out more about what was going on with her. “You’d have to see the doctor. Get checked out, do what he says, get some vitamins. You know, so you wouldn’t faint again while you were working.”

  Shelly seemed to be thinking that over, so Meg delivered the pot roast special to the four tourists in the booth by the door, then wiped down three of the back tables and closed off that part of the dining area.

  “I heard there’s a TV show coming.”

  “It’s possible,” Meg said. “A producer is coming to look at the town and see if it would work for a dating show.”

  “A dating show? Here?” She looked around the restaurant. “What, for old people?”

  Meg couldn’t help laughing. “Not exactly. But I guess you never know what us old folks are up to.”

  “You’re not old. Well, not old old,” she explained, blushing.

  “Thanks.”

  “Who’s going to be on TV, then?”

  “That’s a good question. Our mayor, you met him. Jerry? Red-haired guy with the cell phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s from Ho
llywood or somewhere around there. One of his friends had the idea of bringing women to Willing and pairing them up with some of the men who live here.”

  “Why?”

  “Another good question.” She smiled. “We seem to have an abundance of single men.”

  “Oh, yeah. Forty-eight, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Bizarre.”

  Meg hadn’t thought of it as bizarre, or a problem that needed to be solved. But then again, the single women in Willing—not that there were many of them—didn’t seem inclined to marry, settle down and raise children in this very small town. What if Jerry was right, and the town’s best days were over?

  She worried about the empty storefronts, the lack of jobs and the long winters without much income. Each winter she struggled harder to stay profitable, but she was one of the lucky ones who didn’t have a mortgage. She also had a career to fall back on; her training in restaurant management, along with her chef credentials, guaranteed jobs if she was willing to relocate.

  Not that she wanted to leave Willing.

  “What’s wrong with the women around here?”

  “Not a thing,” Meg said through her teeth. “Does something have to be wrong if you don’t want to get married or haven’t found the right man or want to run your own life your own way?”

  “Oops, sore spot, huh?” Shelly dug her spoon into the bowl of chocolate pudding Al had presented to her. “So I guess I should be asking what’s wrong with the men.”

  Out of the mouths of babes, Meg mused, unable to keep a straight face as she reached for the coffeepot one more time. She couldn’t wait to tell Lucia. With any luck she hadn’t heard about Jerry’s plans and Meg would be there to see her reaction when Lucia heard that busloads of women might be coming to town to discover true love.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOR BETTER OR worse, he was home. Owen opened the door of the truck and watched Boo hop out, stretch and then run barking across the wide dirt driveway that fronted the two-car garage and old equipment shed. The dog greeted the feral gray cat that had slunk from its latest shelter, a root cellar that had seen better days. For some reason, Boo and the cat had bonded. The cat tolerated the barking as long as the dog didn’t get too close to her.

  “Boo,” Owen called, as much to stop the noise as to direct the dog toward the house. “Leave her alone.”

  The dog gave the cat one last yip and trotted obediently toward the big house, as it had been called for more than one hundred years. Owen studied the homestead, wondering what strangers would think of the place. When his father had been young, his grandparents had welcomed visitors to their home, tourists with an interest in Western history or students from the college writing theses with topics such as Scottish Emigration in 1850 and Early Settlers of the American West. Some had been published, and copies proudly lined the bookshelves in the living room.

  From the outside, Owen supposed it looked the same as it ever had. The big house, a white-painted two-story frame Victorian, sat in the midst of a large patch of brown grass surrounded on three sides by windbreaker pines. Off to the west were the outbuildings: the garage and other sheds that housed both necessary and long-forgotten equipment. To the east were Owen’s favorite structures: the original log buildings built by the Scot whose vision had led to owning one of the largest ranches in the state. The log house, with its low roof and small windows, had been carefully preserved, along with the attached log barn.

  The outhouse had long been torn down, as had the first corral. Over the rise were the modern barns, corrals, storage buildings and tin-roofed cattle sheds.

  Owen headed toward the side of the house, where Boo waited on the cracked concrete pad outside the back door. Owen hadn’t bothered to lock up the place. Connected by a wide passageway to the back of the house, just to the right of the door, was the summer kitchen. Originally used as its name implied, the massive one-story room had been modernized over the years. Yet its worn picnic tables were original, as was the cook stove tucked into the corner. On that same distant wall sat an avocado-green gas stove, two deep porcelain sinks and a worn gold-flecked Formica counter. Mismatched cabinets and cupboards had been cobbled together over the years from leftovers of other projects, other ranch houses. Two old round-shouldered refrigerators filled in the other end of the wall. He supposed they’d be considered vintage now, but he didn’t doubt they’d still work when plugged in.

  The days of feeding dozens of men in here were long gone, yet Owen couldn’t think about getting rid of anything, not even the peeling green-painted benches stacked against the near wall.

  He’d first seen Meg right here. She’d turned from the refrigerator, a sweating gallon jar of lemonade in her arms, and he’d hurried over to help her.

  “I’ve got it,” she’d protested, but her cheeks were flushed from the surprising early June heat. She’d let him take the slippery jar and set it on the closest table.

  “You’re new,” he’d said. That was when summers meant extra hands to feed and Irene MacGregor hired a kitchen crew to make sure no one who worked on the ranch ever went hungry.

  “Yes. Today’s my first day.” She’d blushed again and looked away. Her dark hair had been tied back in a long ponytail; she’d worn denim shorts and one of Mrs. Hancock’s red-checked aprons over a blue T-shirt. A strip of blue beads had dangled from each earlobe, but she’d worn no makeup. She had seemed tiny, he realized. Or maybe she’d made him feel eight feet tall.

  “Do you like it so far?” He’d sounded twelve when he’d said that, he remembered, not twenty and two months away from being a junior in college. Too eager.

  “Oh, yes,” she’d said, and her brown eyes had lit up. “I like to cook.”

  “Margaret, Margie, Peg, whatever your name is,” Mrs. Hancock had called, interrupting that long-ago moment with laughter in her voice. “Don’t let the ranch hands turn your head, now. They’re awful flirts!”

  Owen turned away from the memories and shoved open the back door. He eyed the heaps of junk-stuffed boxes that stretched from one wall to another and beyond, in rooms that weren’t visible from the crowded mudroom. He smelled leather and dust, old coffee and dog.

  If there was anything to jolt him out of the past and into the present, it was looking at the mess his life had become. The real-estate agent he’d met with last week had suggested tearing down the buildings.

  “It’s all about the land,” the man had said.

  As if it was that simple.

  * * *

  LUCIA SMOOTHED HER black hair over her shoulders after she’d listened to Meg’s concerns about the stranded bus passenger. “You want me to talk to her? Explain the ins and outs of pregnancy?”

  “Ins and outs,” Mama Marie snorted. “A little late for that.”

  “Mama!” Lucia hid her smile. “Be kind. We don’t know her circumstances, or where her family is or what she’s going through.”

  “No family,” Mama muttered. Tony, Lucia’s youngest, cuddled in his grandmother’s ample lap, his head resting on her shoulder. He’d given up trying to wriggle away and had decided to close his eyes. “A girl with no family—I don’t understand this at all.”

  “Mama, you’ve seen unwed pregnant girls before,” Lucia pointed out. “They’re everywhere.”

  She pulled out her rosary. “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, but—”

  “A girl with no family needs our prayers.”

  Meg silently agreed with her. “Mama,” she said, because everyone in town who knew Mrs. Swallow called her Mama, “I think she’s a runaway.”

  “She certainly doesn’t look eighteen,” Lucia said. Shelly sat in a corner booth, where she nursed a cup of tea and played with her cell phone. “If you can’t keep her here at least overnight, then she might run away again before sh
e sees a doctor.”

  “Run away?” Mama snorted. “Where’s she gonna go? And how’s she gonna get there?”

  “I told her she could stay in my mother’s cabin tonight so she can get checked out at the clinic tomorrow.”

  The statement was met with silence from the Swallow women.

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” Lucia said finally. “Considering you don’t know her.”

  “It’s not as if there’s anything worth stealing,” Meg said. “Unless you count Loralee’s T-shirt collection.”

  Lucia gave her a “what’s really going on here?” look, but after a quick glance at her curious mother-in-law, simply asked, “And then what? She gets back on a bus? That doesn’t seem like a healthy thing to do in her condition.”

  “These girls today,” Mama muttered, “they don’t think.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t have any choice,” Meg pointed out. “She asked me about waitressing, if she stayed here.”

  “Is there enough business?”

  “There could be. And I could use a few hours off to start working on the cabins, at least do some painting inside on the ones that aren’t in bad shape. I might be able to rent them before the end of hunting season.” She lowered her voice, as Mama had begun praying rather loudly. “And there could be more business, lots of it, at least for a little while. There was a town council meeting here this morning.”

  “And that’s interesting because?”

  “Jerry has a Hollywood connection...”

  “Tracy,” Lucia prompted.

  “Yes. How’d you know her name?”

  “She’s all he talks about. I taught that bread-baking class last winter, remember? He flunked.”

  “He did?”

  “He had no sense of dough,” Lucia stated, eyeing her napping child. “They’re so sweet when they’re asleep. He woke me at four o’clock this morning to ask if there were cookies in heaven.”

  “No sense of dough?” Meg stared at her friend. “What does that mean?”

  Lucia turned her attention back to Meg. “I think he was afraid of it.”

  Afraid of dough. Meg considered that for a few seconds. “Like a horror movie.” She continued on with her news. “Tracy has an idea for a reality TV show, for here, in Willing. And Jerry thinks we could use the publicity. As a way to attract new people to town.”