Dry Creek Sweethearts. Janet Tronstad

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СКАЧАТЬ said something, but Lucy clearly wasn’t thinking about the injustice befalling anyone left behind in Dry Creek. She was looking straight at Linda with a hopeful look on her face.

      “You went to Hollywood to visit him,” Lucy said softly. “Remember? I stayed with Mrs. Hargrove and you went to see him. That had to mean something.”

      “That was a long time ago.”

      It was shortly after their mother had died. Their father had been dead for years by then and their mother’s death left Linda broken. It was too much. She had gone to see Duane as instinctively as she’d wept at her mother’s graveside. He’d opened his arms to her, too. She’d been comforted until she realized he had no intention of returning to Dry Creek and she couldn’t go with him on the road chasing his dreams as he’d asked, not when she suddenly had a seven-year-old sister to think about. So she’d left him a note saying things just wouldn’t work out between them and she had come back to Dry Creek.

      Duane had brought Boots back shortly after that, but Linda had refused to see Duane then. She needed to get on with her life and she couldn’t do that if Duane kept stopping by. At the time, she hadn’t known it would be Duane’s last visit to the town. His great-aunt had left him her house, and Linda had thought Duane would need to stop by to tend it. It was his duty to take care of that house; she thought he’d be back often. But he wasn’t.

      “I still think we should name the café after him. We could be The Jazz Café in memory of him,” Lucy said.

      “We don’t need a name. We’re the only café in Dry Creek.”

      Dry Creek had a hardware store, a café, and a part-time bakery. That and a dozen or so houses were all that was around, except for the church, of course. The church was the heart of the community. But the café was central, too. No one even needed directions to the café. It was right there for everyone to see. Linda had never worried about having any signs up except the Open and Closed one in the big front window.

      “I bet people will pay more to eat in a place with a name,” Lucy said. “Don’t you think?”

      “I’m not going to charge more just because there’s a name over the door. Besides, the food tastes the same whether or not we call ourselves something.”

      “Lance says we need a name. That it will increase business.”

      Linda sighed at that. Besides her, the only other friend Duane had in high school had been Lance Walker, a boy who was part Sioux and had come off the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota with a chip on his shoulder that rivaled Duane’s. The two were competitive with each other about everything, but they had become firm friends.

      Lance had been sent to Dry Creek to live with a distant relative, Mr. Higgins, just as Duane had been sent to live with his great-aunt. Lance didn’t have Duane’s wanderlust, though. He’d stayed in the area after high school, and now he rode rodeo in Miles City. After he’d won a couple of events, he’d begun looking for sponsors for the shirt he wore on his back. Linda had offered to sponsor him even if she didn’t have a name to advertise on the shirt, but he refused, saying he was taking advertising not charity.

      “Everything isn’t always about dollars and cents,” Linda said. “Lance knows that.”

      Lance had his pride, and Linda had begun to wonder if he was serious when he kept asking her to close the café early some Saturday night so she could go to dinner with him in Miles City. At first, she thought he was asking her out because of old times, but she was no longer sure. She wished she could feel half the emotions about Lance as she did about Duane’s old dog, Boots.

      Linda told herself she didn’t want to wind up some disappointed old woman who was still bitter because her first love had left her a million years ago and she’d never moved on. Anyway, it would be good to date again. She could hardly use the excuse of raising Lucy much longer, especially now that her sister was a sophomore in high school.

      Linda used to love to date. When she was Lucy’s age, she had her hair streaked with red and her mascara loaded with glitter. She and Duane used to drive into Miles City every Saturday night just to go line dancing. Sometimes Lance would go along with them and the three of them bumped shoulders with strangers and gave wild coyote yells when the line broke apart. It was more aerobic exercise than dancing really, but they liked the feet-stomping excitement of it. They’d wind down with a soda or malt at a late-night diner. Duane liked strawberry. She chose vanilla.

      Those days seemed like an eternity ago. Linda couldn’t recall when she had first started feeling like such an old woman. She was only twenty-seven years old and some days she’d rather spend the evening with her feet propped up than go anywhere. Maybe she needed some new vitamins.

      Of course, she had plenty of energy during the day; it was just when she thought of dating that she got tired and wanted to stay home in her old bathrobe and watch television.

      “Mama always told us to let our light shine,” Lucy said softly. “I think she’d want you to give the café a nice name.”

      Linda’s eyes softened as she looked over at her sister. Lucy was carefully marking a place on the wall to put a nail so she could hang her framed letter. Lucy didn’t really remember their mother saying that about their light; she remembered Linda telling her that their mother had said something like that.

      Their mother hadn’t said much about love or happiness or anything that a young girl could hold on to so Linda added a few quotes of her own to the stories she told Lucy on the theory that their mother might have said something like that if she’d given her and Lucy more than a passing thought. Her mother had been so caught up in mourning the death of their father years ago that she hadn’t paid much attention to either of her two daughters. The admonition to stay away from Duane Enger was the only advice her mother had ever given her about men.

      Linda knew a young girl needed more than that. She needed to feel loved. She also needed to have some words to guide her. And someone to listen to her and understand what she was saying.

      “Maybe you’re right,” Linda finally said. “A name for the café couldn’t hurt us.”

      Lucy smiled up at her. “You won’t be sorry.”

      “Just think of something without Jazz in it. All we need is a simple name. Something like the Morgan Café or the Sunshine or—”

      “Definitely not the Sunshine Café,” Lucy said. “Not in this mud.”

      The rain was a blessing in this part of Southern Montana. For years, there hadn’t been enough of it and the ranchers had been worried about drought. Now the skies were being overly generous with moisture, which made a lot of people, and their cattle, happy even if it didn’t do much for the floor of Linda’s café.

      Still, Linda knew that happy ranchers made good customers, so she thanked God for the rain.

      “We’ll think of a name on the way home, after I finish mopping.” Linda congratulated herself on moving Lucy’s attention away from the letter. Hopefully, once it was hanging on the wall, Lucy would forget about it.

      Linda pulled her mop out of the bucket. The lemon smell of her cleaning solution cut through the old coffee smell. Linda prided herself on her black-and-white floor. That, along with the gray Formica-topped tables, gave the whole place a fifties look. And it was neat and orderly, just the way she liked. She had an old malt machine on the counter and two-dozen malt glasses hanging from a rack above it. She was СКАЧАТЬ