Rodeo Baby Read online

  “I know,” Rachel said quietly, “but you’ve never shared why.”

  Vy sidestepped the deeper issue. “I just don’t trust any man who comes to my town with an agenda. If this guy doesn’t have a scheme up his sleeve, I’ll eat every one of the six coconut-cream pies I made first thing this morning.”

  She wanted to see him brought down. No! Not true. She wanted to bring him down personally.

  Too strong a response, Vy. Cool it.

  “Tell you what, Vy.” Rachel interrupted her thoughts. “We’ll give the guy a trial run, but only if you bring out one of those pies this afternoon.”

  “Deal.”

  * * *

  SAM SAVORED THE last bite of an exquisite pineapple upside-­down cake.

  “This is incredible,” he said, sighing.

  “I know, right?”

  “I could eat here every day.” He put down his fork and rubbed his stomach. “Take that last bite of chocolate layer cake.”

  “Are you sure, Dad?”

  He smiled. “Honey, don’t you know I’d give you my last dollar if it would make you happy?”

  For a change, a genuine smile lit Chelsea’s face and, while it might be tiny, it reminded him of her smiles of old. And, God, he loved it.

  He smiled in return and watched her enjoy the cake.

  “Everything’s taken care of.”

  Sam started. The waitress-cum-manager-cum-owner had appeared beside the table without making a sound. He didn’t like surprises.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, but he knew, and all the good feelings at the table evaporated.

  “I called a friend. Her husband’s ranch is brand-new. He hasn’t hired any hands yet and they could sure use some rent on a couple of spare rooms in the house.”

  She slapped a paper with directions on it onto the table and picked up the cash he’d left for their meal.

  Sam was trapped.

  He’d left New York too quickly and without enough preparation. He hated this feeling.

  But how could he leave without solving Gramps’s dilemma first?

  He needed to blend in. He’d done research online. Successful no matter what he took on, he could do this.

  But damn, he didn’t know a thing about working on a ranch. He’d be as naive as Chelsea if he thought he could be any good as a cowboy after one night of research. This had been a crazy idea from the start.

  Sam opened his mouth to object, to halt this mad process before it went too far, but Violet raised her hand.

  “No need to thank me. It’s what people around here do. Help each other out.” An odd smile hovered at the edges of her full red lips, as though she were having a laugh at his expense, reminding him of his daughter’s smiles these days. “Travis is a newcomer himself, so he’ll make you feel welcome. His wife, Rachel, will take good care of Chelsea while you’re working. Or will she be enrolling in the local school?”

  “Not yet,” Sam replied, not expanding on the subject. No need to air dirty laundry here.

  Sam wondered why Chelsea didn’t object to having a babysitter, this woman Rachel, before realizing his child enjoyed his discomfort. She knew he was trapped.

  Gramps. Think of Gramps. This is all for him.

  “Sure,” he said weakly. “Sounds good.”

  “By the way, in case you didn’t realize, I’m Violet Summer.”

  He figured as much, and Rachel’s last name must be McGuire, one of the women Gramps had told him about. Before his time in this town ended, he’d meet all six of the women resurrecting the fair and possibly ripping off his grandfather.

  “I’m Sam—” He’d almost said Carmichael. He’d been christened Carson Samuel Carmichael like his father and grandfather, but his mother had always called him Sam to distinguish him from his father. That part was easy, but changing Carmichael to Michaels had nearly caught him up. “I’m Sam Michaels. This is my daughter, Chelsea.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around town.”

  He had to start thinking of himself as Sam Michaels or he’d never pull this off.

  Chelsea shot him a look of censure at his name change but he ignored her.

  Sam picked up his hat on the way out of the diner, stepping onto Rodeo’s Main Street and standing a minute to look around town. Might as well know what he was getting into.

  So this was his father’s hometown, the one Dad had left at nineteen when he’d headed east to attend college. He’d made, and married into, a lot of money in New York City. Carson II had never returned to Rodeo, which meant that Sam himself had never been here, either.

  Sam craned his neck to take it all in, curious about his dad’s town. Dad had never talked much about Rodeo, but Gramps sure had.

  Rodeo, Montana. Gramps’s favorite spot on earth.

  He’d described everything to the avid little listener Sam had been as a boy. Two stoplights on Main Street and one small shop after another with names like Jorgenson’s Hardware and Hiram’s Pharmacy and Nelly’s Dos ’n’ Don’ts.

  Angled parking ran all along a wide street filled with plenty of pickup trucks heavy with rust, dust and dirt.

  He drank in every detail, his avidity surprising him with its intensity. He hadn’t realized until arriving how much he’d wanted to see Gramps’s town.

  Why hadn’t Dad ever talked about Rodeo? It didn’t look so bad. Just the opposite in fact, charming but real, unpretentious and normal compared to Manhattan, where people seemed compelled to jump on every trend.

  In this town, every man, woman and child wore well-used denim. Sam detected not a single pair of designer jeans.

  Thank God the jeans he’d bought before they left home were plain and would fit in. He’d gone to a work-wear clothing store to find denim without embroidered pockets or slashed knees or distress wash thighs or fake-faded creases or any of the other fads going around.

  Certain he fit in, he adjusted his cowboy hat. Here, almost everyone wore a cowboy hat.

  Sam soaked it all up like the proverbial sponge. Gramps hadn’t lied about his good-looking, if rustic, town.

  And Sam was immediately smitten.

  “What are you doing, Dad?”

  “Savoring the heritage I’ve never checked out until now.”

  “Why didn’t you ever check it out?”

  “School and then work and then getting married and then having you. You know...” He shrugged. “Life.”

  “Let’s go to the car,” Chelsea demanded. Back to doom, gloom and ’tude, as Violet had called it, all traces of the friendly girl who’d laughed with the waitress dissipated on the cool air.

  Sam grimaced. When he’d married Tiffany, he’d believed in “for better or for worse.” Apparently, she hadn’t.

  He’d loved her. Not so much since her betrayal, though.

  He felt the same way about children. You loved them. You did not give up on them. Purely and simply, they deserved to be loved through thick and thin, without question. He just wished right now that it were easier, especially when he had so much on his mind.

  “Let’s go visit Gramps,” he said.

  Chelsea ran to their vehicle. “Come on, Dad. Don’t be so slow.”

  Ah, enthusiasm. She did love her grandfather. Until recently, he’d come to Manhattan for Christmas every year, but now lived in a retirement home.

  “We should have come here sooner to visit Gramps.”

  Yep. Love for her grandfather for sure.

  Correction, his grandfather, but they’d dispensed with the great part of great-grandfather when Chelsea was little and it had proved too much of a mouthful for her. To Chelsea, he was just Gramps, exactly as he was for Sam.

  An old cowboy nodded to him and Sam smiled and nodded back. Friendly people.

 
They drove toward the next small town, where a seniors’ residence that served the entire county housed Sam’s nearest and dearest. They passed spectacular scenery on the way.

  Chelsea shouted, “Dad, look!”

  Sam glanced to his right. In the field a pair of young lambs ran up one side of a small hillock and down the other, kicking up their heels at the top.

  “Frisky,” he commented.

  “So cute.” In her voice, he heard longing and wonder, refreshing to hear after her recent negativity. His daughter loved animals.

  “Remember when you saw all of those baby lambs at that petting zoo and we couldn’t drag you away for an hour? You were only six years old and fascinated.”

  Good memories.

  She smiled. “That was awesome. You convinced them to let me sit on some hay and hold one for, like, an hour.”

  Sam squeezed her hand. “It was only fifteen minutes, but you were small and that was a long time for you. I think I took twenty photographs. You were so cute.”

  “It was the best, but it’s even better to see them out frolicking in their natural habitat, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is.” He slowed down. “Do you want to watch for a while?”

  “Can we?” She sounded so hopeful he couldn’t disappoint her.

  He sat on the shoulder for fifteen minutes listening to Chelsea laugh, the sound a sweet balm for his ravaged psyche. For the past year and a half, he’d missed his ex-wife’s presence in his life, but even more, he’d missed his daughter’s laughter. He wanted to make her happy again.

  “I guess we should go,” he said reluctantly.

  Sounding contented, she said, “Yeah. I want to see Gramps.”

  A couple of miles later, Sam pulled onto the shoulder of the small highway with a squeal of brakes and spraying gravel.

  “Dad, what are you doing?”

  “Look.”

  He pointed across the road.

  “What’s that?” Chelsea asked.

  “That, my dear child, is your heritage.”

  “That’s Gramps’s amusement park?”

  He heard the doubt in her voice. It echoed in his chest.

  Gramps might have raved about his fairgrounds during his visits, but it looked bad. Most of the rides were rusty. A few were in the process of being updated and fixed. One was being dismantled by a couple of old men with a pair of tractors.

  Far off to the right and back from the road a fair distance was Gramps’s house but Gramps was no longer there.

  Sam had never seen the house but he recognized it from his grandfather’s descriptions and old photographs. Some of those had been black-and-white, shot in the days when the fairgrounds were brand-new more than a century ago, and built by Gramps’s father.

  A tidal wave of emotion swept through him, longing, need and anger culminating in one word: mine.

  He owned a beautiful apartment in the city overlooking Central Park and a huge home in upstate New York. So why should a plain two-story brick home with tilting front steps affect him so? With its modest proportions, two windows on the first floor and three above, the ordinary house didn’t compare well to the showstopper he owned with ten spacious bedrooms. This one had, what? Three? Four, maybe?

  Yet he wanted it.

  That house, these fairgrounds, leased now to a bunch of locals intent on making a profit from his grandfather’s belongings, were out of Sam’s reach.

  An old saying or song lyric, Sam couldn’t remember which, thrummed through him. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Wasn’t that the truth?

  Throughout the busy years, thoughts of Rodeo had been stored in a far corner of his mind, taken out only at Christmas when Gramps came to visit. In all of those years, he had thought the town, and the fairgrounds, would be here waiting for him.

  Then his life had changed. Drastically.

  Last year, it had taken a crazy turn. Now he was about to start a new business in New York.

  Success is the best revenge.

  The idea consumed him. Even so, a part of him yearned for the house, toward knowing and understanding his rural heritage.

  But, for the short time he would be here, he wouldn’t be able to get to know it.

  At least for the next year, those women had control of Sam’s heritage. Worse, Gramps couldn’t remember how long he’d agreed to make the lease. What if it was two, three, five years before Sam got it back?

  “Dad, isn’t it beautiful?” Chelsea’s voice whispered out on a breathy sigh. “It’s awesome.”

  The fairgrounds? Maybe after a massive amount of work. But now? Awesome? No.

  She pointed to something and his eyes adjusted focus from the distant house to the foreground, to a ride right in front of him—a carousel that had been rejuvenated with colorful paint.

  Chelsea was right. Awesome was a good word for it, all fresh and spit shined. Did the machine work? Were the women planning to give rides on it?

  If so, it looked like Chelsea might be first in line.

  Hope and potential all rolled into one, it stood in the weak March sunlight proudly declaring “If I can be saved, so can the rest of this old place.”

  A powerful sentiment.

  “It’s got really weird animals,” Chelsea said, but he detected no disdain.

  “You’re right. Is that a bull?”

  “Yeah, and a couple of sheep.”

  “Bighorn sheep, I’m pretty sure.”

  “There’s a bison! And a cow.” She giggled, the sound sweet on the cool breeze. “What are those?”

  “An elk and two white-tailed deer.”

  “Their saddles are so beautiful. So ornate. I want to ride all of them.” She peered up at him. “Will we still be here when the fair is on?”

  Apparently, they planned to launch in August and it was only March. Sam’s next business venture started in one month. He had only thirty days to get this problem sorted out so he could hightail it home.

  No way was he losing out on the opportunity to make serious money with his new investment firm, Carmichael, Jones and Raven. Between the three partners, their experience totaled fifty years. Sam planned to take the industry by storm.

  If, along the way, he showed up his ex-wife and father-in-law and the company they’d wrestled away from him during the divorce, all the better. Answering Chelsea’s question about attending the fair, he said, “It isn’t likely, possum.”

  His nickname for his daughter slipped out before thought or caution. For some reason, as a little girl, Chelsea had taken a liking to Dame Edna and had giggled every time possum was used as an endearment.

  Sam had called her possum once and she’d rolled on the floor laughing. The name had stuck.

  Sometimes at night, he could hear her accessing YouTube on her laptop and watching old shows she must know by heart.

  Entranced by the carousel, she didn’t call him to task for the nickname she, these days, called stupid.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen here.”

  “If you have your way, there won’t even be a fair.” How could one young girl hold so much bitterness? Had the divorce harmed her beyond repair?

  He hoped not, with a fierceness that shocked him.

  “You know what? This place looks bad now, but I can see the potential. I can see what Gramps and his father built.”

  Chelsea nodded. “Yeah, it must have been really cool years ago.”

  “I agree.” Dad must have spent a fair bit of time every summer working here. Then he’d walked away from it all and never looked back.

  Sam couldn’t get enough of the place. He could stand here for hours checking it out. Even better, he’d like to walk the land. It might be derelict now, but it must have been magical in its day.

&
nbsp; “I should ask Gramps if I can get in to look around.”

  “Can I come, too?”

  “Of course.”

  Sighing, he straightened away from the fence.

  “Let’s go visit Gramps and then find this ranch I’m supposed to be working on.”

  Chelsea snorted. He ignored it. It had been a long trip. He’d had plenty of practice ignoring her.

  On second thought...

  He pulled out the change purse, opened it and held it out to her. “Snorting.”

  “It’s not really snorting, Dad,” she said in her best disdainful teenage voice. “Nobody really snorts.”

  Sam imitated a pig by letting out a huge snort. Chelsea tried not to giggle.

  “I don’t walk around sounding like a pig. It’s more like humphing.”

  “I know, but it has the same effect. Lack of respect. Pay up.”

  She snorted again, rummaged in her pocket and came up with a quarter.

  Chapter Three

  At the seniors’ residence, Sam parked and they got out of the car.

  Sam had come to Rodeo to check out this place along with the women.

  Gramps had been admitted nine or so months ago, when much of Sam’s life had still been in a state of flux, with visits to the lawyer’s office almost a daily occurrence.

  Sam had seen many horror stories about elder abuse on the news. He hadn’t known what to expect, but the two-story residence looked homey. Wide windows on the first floor looked out on golden fields and gray mountains in the distance.

  “This doesn’t look so bad,” Sam said.

  Sam corresponded with Gramps regularly, but hadn’t seen him in a couple of years thanks to his messy divorce. Whatever had been happening in his own life, he should have taken the time to come see his grandfather, to make sure everything was okay.

  Considering that Gramps had visited every year since Sam was born, his canceled trips had been a real cause for concern.

  Then again, he was pushing ninety.

  At the reception desk, they got his room number. Sam found the pace of his steps quickening the farther down the hallway he strode and the closer he got to his grandfather.