The Loves of Ruby Dee Read online

  People weren’t given to visiting the Starrs. Once in awhile a couple of Lonnie’s buddies would show up, but they always hung around out at the arena. Will couldn’t be called a socializer, and if the old man had anything at all to say to anyone, it wasn’t good.

  Will worked up suds, and the water ran dark. He stuck his head down and rinsed his face, threw water on the back of his neck. Lonnie handed him the towel, and he dried his face vigorously.

  “Miss D’Angelo isn’t gonna have time to do any shoppin’. She isn’t stayin’.”

  Will said it straight, going on the supposition that the sooner dealt with, the sooner done with. When he looked up, his brother was staring at him.

  “You’re not even gonna give her a try, are you? You get one look at her, and you make up your mind to that.” Lonnie shook his head angrily. “I told you that you should have gone down and interviewed her yourself in Okie City. It makes damn little sense to bring her all the way up here for nothin’. That isn’t a nice thing to do at all,” he added righteously, which was pretty silly. Lonnie threw around righteousness the way some people did their socks, using it when it suited him.

  “She came up here on provision, and she’s been well paid for her time and trouble,” was Will’s answer as he finished drying his hands and arms. “Besides, I interviewed the four before her, and none of them turned out to be what we hoped when they got on the job. I didn’t have time to go chasin’ down to Oklahoma City on a fool’s errand. There’s a ranch to run, and the old man to see to.”

  “Meanin’ I can’t do either, right?” Lonnie said, peeved.

  “No. Mostly what it is, is that you don’t want to do either.”

  That truth sat there a loud second.

  “You just don’t like to leave this ranch anymore, is what it is,” Lonnie said, pointing at Will. “You’ve gotten to be like an old woman that won’t let go.”

  They stared at each other, the barbs they had slung echoing in the angry silence that followed.

  “I guess we’re both doin’ the best we can,” Will said flatly, and turned on his heel.

  He went to the back porch, where the shirts he’d brought home from the laundry still hung from the ceiling hook. He tore off the plastic wrapping and jerked a shirt off the hanger, then slipped into it. The damn cuff was ragged. He rolled it up.

  Lonnie leaned against the counter, sipping his beer. “The old man has run off four housekeepers in the past five months.” His gaze said he held Will to account for it.

  Will said, “He run off three. I ran off the last one.” The last one had been the male housekeeper, the great idea that had turned bad. The man had liked to sleep half the day and smoke smelly cigars the other half, and when Will had caught him stealing from the kitchen money to play poker with old buddies who suddenly started dropping by, he had sent him on his way.

  Lonnie sighed heavily. “Look, Will, if you’re upset by the way I was playin’ with the gal, you got the wrong idea. I’m just like that with women. It doesn’t mean anything, and you ought to know that by now. Let her stay until the old man runs her off, so we can at least get one or two good meals. It wouldn’t hurt to come in here and see a face prettier than yours, either, and I don’t think I need to feel ashamed of that.”

  Will shook his head as he buttoned his shirt. “I know, Lon. I’m damn tired of cold food and dirty laundry and tryin’ to keep the old man from killing himself, just as much as you are. But look at her. She’s...” He gestured toward the office, unable to find words for what he wanted to say. “It’s a cinch the old man would chew her up and spit her out in all of five seconds, Lon.”

  That familiar stubborn look came over his brother’s face. “Maybe she looks tender, but that sure is a refreshing change from those you’ve been gettin’ in here. She’s a woman who happens to look and act like one.”

  Will clamped his mouth shut at that.

  “Aw, Will, face it. Nobody you get in here is gonna change the facts. The old man is mean as a junkyard dog, and always has been. Mama left because of it. And now he’s eighty-five, has diabetes and is off the beam from his stroke. He ain’t likely to get better, and he’ll have us all sick and crazy before he’s through. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have to live this way. He keeps the hands run off and us tied here, same as if we had a rope around our necks.”

  “Mama left because she got a boyfriend,” Will said, jerking up his zipper and fastening his belt. “And I hadn’t noticed you keepin’ yourself from going off to your rodeos and women. When did that happen?”

  Lonnie said, “I’m here now, and it sure ain’t because I couldn’t be off workin’ somewhere else.” He poked his finger at Will. “I work this ranch, same as you. I’ve given half my life to it, and I’m damn tired of being treated like nothin’ but a no-account hand that the old man can’t even stomach lookin’ at. I’ve had it, Will.”

  Looking at Lonnie’s flushed and furious face, Will swallowed and clenched and unclenched his hands. He wanted to take off right then, head out and never look back. But Lonnie was his brother and the old man was his dad, and somehow Will had to keep them all together. That had been his responsibility for twenty-five years, to keep them together. God, he was damned tired of the load.

  He breathed deeply and said, “Aw, Lon, the old man—”

  Suddenly he saw the girl. She stepped out from the entry to the office and stood gazing at him with her big brown eyes.

  Embarrassment washed over him. He and Lonnie hadn’t been yelling, but Will wondered how much she had heard. Her dark eyes went from him to Lonnie and came back to rest on him. They were totally unreadable.

  “Could I use y’all’s bathroom?”

  It was Lonnie who jumped to show her, with the dog at her heels, the way. And as she followed his brother through the archway to the dining room, Will gazed at the girl and thought how there had not been a pretty young woman in this house since the day his mother had left, twenty-five years ago.

  There never had been a dog.

  Chapter 2

  Ruby Dee regretted having to interrupt the brothers’ conversation, it being neither polite nor prudent to interrupt an argument. But she had been about to ask for the bathroom before Will Starr had raced off and left her in his office, and now she was about to pee her pants.

  Lonnie Starr was just as sweet as he could be, showing her through the dining room and into the hallway to the bathroom. He was a man at ease with women. The other one, Will Starr, was not.

  She had not needed to hear what Will Starr said in the kitchen to know that he did not want her here—and with her ear pressed to the door, she had heard almost every word. She had known it, though, from the first sight of him walking across to greet her. Disapproval had been all over him like a wash of paint.

  Oh, he was attracted to her. She had seen that, too. Felt it in a vibration, as well as caught it in a glimmer of his blue eyes, before he’d hidden it. Ruby Dee was good at reading people. And men always seemed attracted to her. A lot of them seemed to disapprove of her, too. Miss Edna had always said Ruby Dee frightened men, said that they were put off by the way she met their gazes with her own and didn’t pretend to not know what was going on. Ruby Dee just didn’t know how else she was supposed to be. She was who she was, and didn’t see any need to hide it.

  “Well,” she said in a shaky whisper, and then she began to cry.

  Sally nudged her knee with a cold nose, offering consolation—and seeking it, too. Border collies were possessed of a nervous disposition, and when Ruby Dee got shook up, Sally did, too, no doubt recalling when she had been lost at the 7-Eleven and the dog catcher was trying to get her.

  Ruby Dee flushed the toilet and turned on the water in the sink, then sank down onto the side of the tub—and boy, that tub needed scrubbing—and cried into the dingy hand towel, the only one that had been hanging on the towel rod. Judging from the towel and the tub, the water was hard, and they needed to add baking soda to their wash water.
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  That was what tears were to Ruby Dee—wash water, as good at cleansing hurts from the spirit as a bath was for dirt from the body. It was Ruby Dee’s opinion that crying was a necessity for good health too much neglected by people. Most people were ashamed of crying, as if it were a weakness, but to Ruby Dee there was no more shame to be found in crying than there was in taking a shower or a teaspoonful of cod liver oil. All three things were healing to a body.

  Healing was Ruby Dee’s calling. She was by license a practical nurse, but she considered herself a healer, which in her estimation stood a lot higher than a nurse or a doctor. Nurses and doctors could be trained, as far as it went, but a healer was one who had received a special talent directly from God. Indeed, Miss Edna had said that Ruby Dee was next to God in bringing living things back from the brink of death and comforting those who were slipping over. Her exceptional abilities in this direction kept her almost constantly employed in private home care.

  “Oh, Miss Edna,” Ruby Dee whispered into the dingy towel. “What am I gonna do now? I’ve driven all this way, and he disapproves of me, and I’m so tired.” Ruby Dee sank into her melancholy like a pebble tossed into cream gravy.

  The next instant Ruby Dee heard Miss Edna’s familiar “Straighten up!”

  Miss Edna had been one of those to disdain crying, and “straighten up” had been a favored command. Mostly she’d said it while she watched the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. “People just need to straighten up,” she’d say. “You tell them to straighten up, Tom.”

  Ruby Dee thought she should have told people to cry more. “If you had done more cryin’, you would have lived longer, Miss Edna,” she mumbled in aggravation.

  The frequent death of her patients was, of course, the major problem with Ruby Dee’s occupation. Her patients were predominantly elderly or people who’d been sent home because medical science could do very little for them. Ruby Dee could only bring these patients back from the brink of death so many times before they finally slipped over and left her. This was very hard on her spirit, and led to a lot of crying. She had been crying every day for a month, because of Miss Edna’s finally having slipped over and left her. Ruby Dee had done everything she knew how to do, and still Miss Edna had died.

  Sniffing, she fished in her pocket and brought out a lace-edged hanky bearing the carefully embroidered initials EMS. Edna Marie Summerill. Miss Edna had given Ruby Dee all the lovely handkerchiefs she owned. “Someone who cries as much as you do should always have a hanky,” Miss Edna had said.

  Folding the hanky so that she wouldn’t soil the embroidered initials, as Miss Edna had taught her, Ruby Dee blew her nose, hard.

  Sensing a return to calmness, Sally moved away and went to make a place to lie on some towels in the corner.

  “Sally, don’t be sniffin’ those towels. Come here; you can lay on this rug. That’s a good girl.”

  Ruby Dee didn’t know how long those towels had been lying piled in the corner, but she knew that, left too long in a place that wasn’t too clean anyway, towels could draw centipedes, and she certainly didn’t want Sally dislodging one and possibly getting bitten. Ruby Dee had been terrified of centipedes ever since the age of five, when she had been bitten by one.

  It had been the day after her daddy had gone off and left her with Big Grandma. Her daddy had gone off and left her a lot, the final place being Big Grandma’s house, where she was to reside in the closed-in front porch with the rotted floor.

  Ruby Dee had been digging through her meager clothes piled in the corner of the porch-bedroom, when she came away with not only a T-shirt in hand, but the biggest, meanest, cinnamon-crusted monster momentarily attached.

  Unfortunately, Big Grandma, not at all happy to have had a child dumped upon her, was also totally against crying, and Ruby Dee was crying up a storm. Big Grandma had slapped Ruby Dee silly, saying, “Stop cryin’, or I’ll give you somethin’ to cry about.”

  That attitude never had made a lot of sense to Ruby Dee. She had come to learn early, though, not to expect human beings to make sense. Humans were perhaps the only beings in the good Lord’s universe that on a regular basis did not make sense. This belief freed Ruby Dee, as a member of the human race, from the constant need to make sense or explain herself. It also led her to a great degree of tolerance for and even acceptance of her fellow man. As she saw it, if people would accept each other as they were, everyone would be a lot happier, and then, of course, healthier. It really was that simple...and that impossible.

  Her eyes fell on her boots, and she automatically dusted them, using the now thoroughly damp dingy towel. Her boots were brand-new Noconas. She had bought them with the money Will Starr had sent her for traveling expenses, which was hers to keep whether or not she took the job. Will Starr had struck her as being a mite stuffy, but he wasn’t a cheap man.

  By all rights, she should have spent the money he sent her on new tires, but instead she had bought five cans of Fix-a-Flat and these boots, nourishing her spirit.

  Undoubtedly Will Starr would have disapproved. Will Starr was the older one by a good chunk of years, and she wondered at this, because the brothers certainly looked enough alike to have come from the same pod, so to speak. They were good looking men, as far as that went, both with solid, square faces, shiny mahogany hair and light eyes. Lonnie Starr was lighter, though, in spirit and appearance. Will Starr struck Ruby Dee as being as stormy as his steel-colored eyes.

  Suddenly she remembered all the water she had been running to cover the sound of her crying. With a stab of guilt at being wasteful of a precious natural resource, she rinsed her face, shut the water off tight, then patted herself dry with the dingy towel. It was really wet now, so she spread it neatly on the towel rod.

  Well.

  She stared at herself in the mirror and took her fingers to her hair. She had nice wavy hair and it hardly ever needed anything done to it. Her features were on the plain side, but her complexion was that of peaches and cream, so she didn’t bother with makeup, except lipstick. She brought a tube from her pocket and carefully put it on. Heated Sunset. There, she felt stronger.

  Idly she opened the medicine cabinet. It, too, was not very clean. Certainly it was a man’s cabinet, one man, she would guess, probably the eldest Starr, because there was an old-fashioned shaving-cream cup and brush on the shelf. She liked him for that, for the cup and brush conserved, but the plastic disposable shavers made her subtract a point or two. There was a bottle of Old Spice aftershave, which looked as old as the shaving-cream cup and was all sticky around the top. The shelves were caked with who knew what-all. This cabinet was not at all sanitary. Ruby Dee took the dingy hand towel again and wiped the shelves as best she could.

  She looked around the room. It smelled musty. It was lime green, a popular color of the forties and fifties, and she guessed that not one thing had been done to it since then, except to install a new shower curtain, which was black. And caked with soap and hard-water deposits. Vinegar would handle that.

  From what she had briefly seen, there was no sign of a woman anywhere, and the whole house was ugly. There were hardly any pictures on the walls, and all the furniture was at least thirty years old and had been bought with no taste in the first place. It was dreary and sad, and no doubt an indication of the state of the people living in it.

  She could help them, she thought, if Will Starr would allow it. Or if she could get herself together enough to do it.

  Moving to the window, she pulled back the curtain. Dust flew, and made her sneeze. She blew her nose again with Miss Edna’s hanky, then clutched it and gazed out the window at the rolling grassland stretching down to a line of trees, all of them leaning toward the north. Bent that way from the constant south winds. Past that thin line of trees, the land rolled into more grass, browned now by the harsh sun. No other houses, not even electric lines. Just land and sky, far as the eye could see. It was peaceful.

  Putting her hand into her left pocket this time, Ruby Dee broug
ht out a piece of paper folded into a small square. It was pressed and crumpled from where she had tucked it inside her bra for at least a week, but doing that had proved to be uncomfortable. Her sweat had made the paper stick to her skin.

  Miss Edna kept Ruby Dee from going crazy just then. She could tell Miss Edna things she would never have told anyone else, and she saw no reason to stop just because Miss Edna was dead.

  Chapter 3

  While the gal was in the bathroom, Lonnie again took up the matter of keeping her. From the minute he had laid eyes on Ruby Dee D’Angelo, he had been taken with the idea of having her around the house. He wanted her there something fierce.

  Lonnie knew actualization of his desire was slim to none, because even if Will let her stay, the old man would keep them all in an uproar, but a part of him just wouldn’t let go of the idea. And if nothing else, he figured he could at least harass Will, because as he saw it, Will and the old man were dealing him an injustice that wasn’t necessary at all.

  “So are you gonna go in and get the chicken dinners from Reeves’s tonight?” he asked, following Will into the office and throwing himself down in the old leather chair. He wanted Will to think about what they would be having to do.

  Will raked a hand through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said irritably as he began to dig through papers on his desk.

  “If you hired Ruby Dee D’Angelo, you wouldn’t have to go get chicken dinners…or anything else.”

  Will ignored him. He picked up a paper, looked at it and threw it aside, frowning.

  “What is it?” Lonnie asked, getting up and reaching for the paper.

  Will said, “She just won’t work out, Lonnie. There’s no sense in gettin’ everybody in a ruckus by tryin’ to make it work.”

  Lonnie had a sense that Will might want to try the gal after all. Will seemed to be arguing with himself. Lonnie read the paper. It was the gal’s résumé. “This looks pretty impressive to me.”