Big Sky Country. Linda Lael Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ door opened, and Callie, broom in hand, beamed a greeting.

      “Hey,” she called.

      “Hey,” Slade replied gruffly.

      Callie Barlow was a small woman, big-busted, with an abundance of auburn hair held to the top of her head by a plastic clasp roughly the size of the jaws-of-life, and she wore turquoise jeans, pink Western boots and a bright yellow T-shirt studded with little sparkly things.

      “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, setting aside the broom and dusting her hands together. Her expression was warm, as always, but her gray eyes showed puzzlement bordering on concern. She knew Slade took his job seriously, and it wasn’t like him to drop in during working hours. “Is the county running itself these days?”

      “My deputies are holding down the fort,” Slade answered. “Is the coffee on?”

      He knew it was; he could smell the rich aroma wafting through the open doorway, along with tinges of industrial-strength shampoo and a variety of mysterious hair-bending chemicals.

      “Sure,” Callie responded, stepping back so he could come inside the shop. “That’s about the first thing I do every morning—plug in the coffeepot.” The faintest ghost of a frown lingered in her eyes, and then her natural bluntness broke through. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

      Slade sighed, took off his hat and set it aside on the counter next to Callie’s cash register. “I don’t know if wrong is the word for it,” he said. “I just came from Maggie Landers’s office. It seems John Carmody remembered me in his will.”

      Callie’s eyes widened at that, then narrowed in swift suspicion. “What?” she asked and had to clear her throat afterward.

      He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and tilted his head to one side, watching her. If Callie had known about the bequest ahead of time, she was doing a damn good job of hiding the fact.

      “Half,” he said. “He left me half of everything he had.”

      Callie sank into one of the dryer chairs, nearly bumping her head on the plastic dome. She blinked a couple of times, and one of her false lashes popped loose at the outside corner of her eye. She pressed it back down with a fingertip.

      “I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

      Slade raised the dome above the chair next to his mother’s and sat down beside her. Took her hand just long enough to give it a slight squeeze.

      “Believe it,” he said, not knowing where to go from there. He loved Callie and they were close, but she hadn’t raised him to come running home to her with this or any other kind of news.

      “What happens now?” she asked in a small voice. Her lower lip wobbled a little, and her eyes, usually bright and mischievous, looked dull, almost haunted.

      “I have no idea,” Slade answered quietly. “Not surprisingly, Hutch didn’t take it real well. He’s already offered to buy out my share of the ranch.”

      Callie closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again, the shine was back. She was tough—she’d had to be, orphaned young and later giving birth to a child out of wedlock in a town where such things mattered, and mattered a lot—but her problems hadn’t hardened her the way they would’ve some women. She’d taken things as they’d come, made the best of them and raised Slade to respect her—and himself. She was one of the most emotionally balanced people he’d ever known, but he wondered sometimes how much of that was an act.

      “Once or twice, when you were growing up,” she recalled now, her tone musing and a little distant, “John slipped me a few dollars for groceries or light bills or something you needed for school—things like that—but I never thought he’d do this. Not for one moment.”

      “He was full of surprises, I guess,” Slade said with a touch of irony.

      “He was full of himself,” Callie said. “He was so afraid I’d up and name you after him and make the scandal worse than it already was, but when I called you ‘Slade,’ he said I’d been watching too many TV Westerns. I never bothered to tell him that I got your name from a story I read in Ranch Romances.”

      Slade smiled. She’d told him about the magazines she’d loved to lose herself in back in the day, and how she’d named him after one of her favorite heroes.

      She hadn’t gone to Carmody’s funeral, hadn’t even mentioned the man’s name in recent memory, and only then did it occur to Slade that she might be grieving his loss just the same. She must have loved John Carmody once.

      “You all right?” he asked.

      She nodded. Swallowed. “Are you going to take Hutch up on his offer?” she finally inquired.

      He sighed again. “Damned if I know,” he said. “On the one hand, I could see myself accepting, buying that land I’ve had my eye on all this time—building a house and putting up a barn. But on the other...well, there’s a part of me that wants to claim my birthright and have the whole world know it.”

      Callie patted his hand, rose from the dryer chair and crossed to the coffeepot, a gleaming metal monstrosity that sounded like an old-fashioned steam boiler when it was plugged in.

      “I guess that’s understandable,” she said, keeping her back to him as she filled a good-sized foam cup and popped a lid onto the top. “Wanting folks to know the truth, I mean.”

      Slade was on his feet, retrieving his hat from the counter, turning the brim slowly in his hands. “I don’t reckon it will surprise anybody,” he reminded her, recalling the gossip that had started so many schoolyard brawls while he was growing up.

      Callie had been barely twenty years old when she’d taken up with Carmody; naive and alone in the world, and fresh out of some fly-by-night beauty school in Missoula with nothing but her license to cut hair, the old trailer she’d grown up in and the two hardscrabble acres sloping down to Buffalo Creek behind it. Her beloved “granddad” had been dead two years by then.

      “I’m sorry, Slade,” she said now. “For all you had to go through on my account, I mean. Practically everybody I knew said I ought to put you up for adoption, once I knew John had intended to marry someone else all along, but I just couldn’t do it. I guess it was selfish of me, but you were my boy and I wanted to see you grow up.”

      “I know,” Slade said, as he stooped to kiss her forehead. He’d heard all of it before, after all, and while he understood Callie’s personal regrets, the fact of the matter was, he was glad she’d kept him. She’d sacrificed a lot, working long hours to build the business that had supported them both, though just barely sometimes, passing up more than one chance to get married, move away from Parable and finally enjoy a degree of respectability.

      Instead, she’d stuck it out, right there in the old hometown, where she believed she had every right to be, as did her son, whether John Carmody, his high-society bride or the snootier locals had liked it or not.

      Slade had tried to put it into words how grateful he was for the rock-solid courage she’d always shown, for the example she’d set by working hard, standing her ground and just plain showing up for life and doing what she could with what she had. Because of her, he’d grown up strong, sound-minded and at home in his body, with a quiet confidence in СКАЧАТЬ