A Cowboy of Her Own

“No, but I wanted to have a little fun before I went to bed.”

“Do you always hit up the bars and women when you’re on the road?” She swallowed a groan. She was the same age as Porter, but she sounded like a crotchety old woman.

“As far as I know, when I’m off the clock it’s not against company policy to have a beer or a dance with a pretty girl. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Forget I asked.” Wendy wanted to get to the motel, enjoy a soak in the tub and then drift off to sleep—after she checked her email.

“If I go out for a beer, will the information end up in your report?”

“What do mean?”

“Are you documenting my after-hours activities on this trip?”

“No.” She tapped her fingernail against the armrest, willing the next ten miles to pass quickly.

“What do you do when you’re off the clock?” he asked.

She laughed. “When is that?”

“You don’t work 24/7...do you?”

“No, but there’s always email and phone calls to catch up on.”

“Surely your clients know you have a life outside of your job.”

“Maybe, but livestock disasters strike whenever and wherever with no respect for the human workweek.”

“There’s no blizzard or dust storm affecting cows or horses tonight. What do you say we stretch our legs and let loose for a couple of hours before we check into a motel?”

A couple of hours—was he nuts? “If you drink and drive, I’ll have to put it my report.”

He flashed his pearly whites. “Then I’ll be the designated driver.”

“Get serious, Porter.”

He frowned. “I am serious.”

She opened her mouth to argue with him but changed her mind—until she caught him shaking his head. “What?” she asked.

“It’s weird that you and my sister are friends.”

“Why is it weird?”

“Dixie was rebellious but I doubt you ever went against your parents’ wishes.”

She didn’t care for the critical tone in his voice, but bit her tongue. It would be cruel to argue that she respected her parents when Dixie and her brothers grew up without a mother and a father.

“Dixie gave my grandparents fits in junior high when she snuck off with Tanner Hamilton. They grounded her, but she kept leaving the house to be with him. My brothers and I followed her one night. Turns out she and Tanner had entered a dance competition and they were practicing in his family’s garage.”

Wendy knew that. “Glen Smith asked me to be his dance partner for the contest.”

“You snuck out of your house, too?”

She hadn’t dared disobey her parents. They would have been horrified if she’d met a boy late at night. She recalled sitting in the school cafeteria, listening to Dixie, Shannon and the other girls laugh and joke about the fun they’d had with the boys.

“I had to tell Glen I couldn’t be his dance partner.”

“Why not?”

She waved a hand in the air. “My parents wouldn’t have approved.”

“Did you have to follow a lot of rules growing up?” He chuckled. “Heck, after our grandparents went to bed at nine o’clock we’d sneak out and meet up with the Stockton brothers and party out in the desert.”

“No parties for me,” she said. Her parents hadn’t needed to set boundaries with her. The dos and don’ts had been implied. Come to think of it, Wendy couldn’t remember her father or mother ever raising their voices at her. Their preferred method of discipline had been giving her the look. The disappointment and censure in their eyes had affected her far more than if they’d grounded her.

“I think Grandma Ada and Grandpa Ely knew we ran wild after hours, but they were old and too tired to chase us down. And we never broke the law, except for the underage drinking.”

“Dixie doesn’t talk about your mother much.”

“She wasn’t around very often and when she was, she acted like one of us. I remember asking to borrow her car and she told me to check with my grandfather. It was as if she didn’t consider us her kids.”

“Dixie loved your grandmother.”

“Yeah, it was tough on her when Grandma Ada died. The two used to spend hours in the barn making soaps from the family recipes.”

Wendy wished she had a memory of doing something special with her mother—besides arranging flowers. But her mother and father were always busy in the shop. If Wendy had ever complained, her parents made her feel guilty, insisting they were toiling away for her future. It was difficult for her to be angry with them after they’d help pay for her college education.

“Who knows where I’d be now if I’d been raised by a mother and a father,” Porter said.

If you’d been raised by my parents, you wouldn’t have had nearly the fun you had on the farm. And I guarantee you wouldn’t be driving a livestock truck.

Hoping to divert the conversation away from her childhood, she asked, “What are your hobbies?”

“Just rodeo. There’s nothing like the rush of competing against a bull or bronc.”

“Dixie said you and your brothers used to sneak onto your neighbor’s property and ride his cows.”

“Fred Pendleton and his wife, Millie, never had kids of their own and they ratted on me and my brothers every chance they got.”

“What did your grandparents do?”

“Not much until Conway and Buck got caught letting Pendleton’s prized heifer out of the pasture. The old man called social services and told them that our grandparents were too old to raise a bunch of hooligans and we should be taken away from them.”

“That was mean.”

“A lady from child welfare services stopped by the farm and threatened to put us all in different foster homes and it scared us kids bad enough that we quit playing pranks on the neighbors.”

Wendy couldn’t imagine the Cash siblings being split up. They were a tight-knit family who looked out for one another.