Christmas on the Ranch Page 6

  She tried to ignore the thrill of that simple compliment. “Uh. Thanks.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Um. You’re welcome.”

  When she reached for the baby, he took the bottle from her instead, saying, “I think I can manage to feed her. Jackie helped me change her just now, but I got this.”

  “Ah. Well, um...” Fawn grabbed up a towel and wiped her hands again. “I’ll mash these potatoes, then.”

  Smiling, Dixon nudged Bella’s fist out of her mouth with the nipple then laughed as she latched on.

  “Be sure not to let air into the nipple,” Fawn counseled. “Keep it full of formula. And don’t let her suck it dry.”

  “Okay.” He tilted the bottle upward a bit before walking over to the table and pulling out a chair with his foot.

  Fawn got busy with the meal, keeping one eye on the preparations and the other on Dixon and the baby. He kept talking to Bella and laughing at her.

  “She doesn’t let anything get in the way of that bottle, does she? She looks you straight in the eyes like she’s talking to you, but all the while she’s guzzling down the milk.”

  “She’s really a very good baby,” Fawn said. “She was sleeping through the night within three weeks of birth.”

  “So you’ve been with them from the very beginning,” Dixon surmised.

  “I’ve known your mother—” Fawn had to stop to think “—nearly four years, so yeah, from before the beginning with Bella.”

  “I didn’t realize. I guess I just didn’t think it through. I hope Jackie realizes what a good friend you are.”

  Fawn turned the burner off under her gravy and turned to face him. “She’d do the same thing for me.”

  Dixon looked down at Bella and adjusted the bottle. “Good to know. But...too often, Jackie’s ordeals are of her own making.”

  Fawn sighed. “I’m the first to admit that I don’t know a lot about men, but Grandmother says that you all listen with your heads too much, that you need women to teach you to hear with your hearts. When your mother and grandmother were fighting, did you never hear the anguish or anger in their words? Did you never hear the disappointment and rejection in your grandmother’s criticism? The pain and shame in your mother’s recriminations?”

  “You can justify almost anything,” he argued, focusing on the baby, “but common sense ought to win sometimes.”

  “Common sense would say that she shouldn’t have had Bella. Do you think she shouldn’t have had Bella?” Fawn demanded, folding her arms. “The doctors all pressed her to give up the idea of carrying Bella to term, but she insisted, no matter what that meant to her personally. She wouldn’t have given up Bella any more than she’d have given up you when everyone but your father demanded she do that!”

  He looked stunned, allowing the nipple to slip from the baby’s mouth. “What? Who demanded that she give me up?”

  Realizing that she’d said too much, Fawn turned back to the stove. “That’s not my truth to tell. All I’m saying is that you should open your heart a little. Now, I have to get this food on the table.”

  Bella squawked, but then she burped loudly as Dixon got to his feet. Before Fawn could turn again, he had carried the baby from the room. Biting her tongue, Fawn wondered if she should follow, but in the end she merely bowed her head and prayed for God to shower both mother and son with wisdom and understanding.

  She shouldn’t care that she’d probably just destroyed any good opinion of her that Dixon might have formed to this point. But she did care. Much, much more than she should.

  Chapter Six

  With his hands full of baby and bottle, Dixon couldn’t very well knock on his mother’s bedroom door, so he simply shouldered it open and went inside. Jackie lay atop the bedcovers, thumbing through the photo album. Dixon didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Is it true that you were pressured to give me up?”

  Jackie jerked around on the bed. When she saw him standing there with Bella, her dismay gave way to a pleading smile. She sat up.

  “Don’t think too badly of your grandparents for that. I was very young, after all, and they were in shock. I was their little girl, and that was all they could think about just then. It’s understandable that their first impulse was for me to give you up for adoption.”

  For a moment he could hardly breathe. Then Bella squirmed, and he had to readjust to keep from dropping her. Jackie held out her arms. He laid the baby on the bed next to their mother and sat beside her.

  “I have a hard time thinking of Grandma and Grandpa not wanting me. They were the one real constant in my life. They loved me.”

  “We all loved you,” Jackie asserted. “That was part of the problem. As soon as you were born, your grandmother wanted to be your mother as much as I did.”

  “And that’s when you regretted having me,” he ventured.

  “Never!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never regretted having you or keeping you. I only regret that I wasn’t mature enough to handle motherhood and marriage better. It was much more difficult than I’d imagined. I was a spoiled only child, Dix, and when Greg’s mother died and his father decided to take a job in Washington, DC, I convinced Greg that if we had a baby, everyone would let us get married and we could stay together. I didn’t think beyond that. I didn’t consider what it would cost him or me or my parents. I didn’t realize how disappointed they would be in me or what it would do to our relationship. The depth of their anger shocked me. But I wouldn’t change it because it gave us you. I wish I’d done a lot of things differently, son, but not you.”

  He nodded and swallowed down the lump in his throat. “I think I understand.”

  “I’m so proud of how you turned out, Dix, and I have your grandparents to thank for that. I might have felt that they no longer had room left in their lives for me, but I can’t fault them for all they did for you.”

  He looked up sharply at that, realizing suddenly that his grandmother’s possessiveness had had another side to it, an exclusivity, as if she’d needed to concentrate her love on one person or thing at a time. Moreover, she’d demanded an exclusive kind of loyalty from those around her. That must have played a part in his parents’ divorce, but now he wondered if it had also led him to supplant his own mother in his grandmother’s affections.

  Did you ever ask yourself why your mother did those things?

  Little more than a child herself, Jackie must have felt so bereft, abandoned, unloved in her own home. Yet, he looked at Bella and knew, knew, that her presence made no difference at all in how his mother felt about him. He remembered what his father had told him about his grandmother punishing Jackie for disappointing her.

  “Mom,” he asked carefully, watching Bella clasp his finger with her tiny fist, “why didn’t Grandma have any more kids?”

  Jackie sniffed and said, “She used to tell me that one perfect child was enough for any mother. But that was before I embarrassed her in front of the whole town.”

  It was just as his father had said, then, just as he’d feared. One love at a time. So much he hadn’t understood. So much he’d never have understood if Fawn hadn’t spoken up. He looked at his mother, searching for words. Tears stood in Jackie’s eyes. Yet, oddly, she smiled, too. The apology fell out of his mouth.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  She reached up and pressed her fingertips to his lips, shaking her head. Tears rolled down her thin cheeks even as her smile broadened. “That’s the first time you’ve called me Mom in years.”

  Before he could apologize for that, too, Fawn called out, “Food’s getting cold!”

  Jackie hastily wiped her eyes and scooted toward the foot of the bed, saying, “You take your sister. I’ll grab the carrier.”

  Dixon didn’t argue, but he waited for her to catch up to
him then put the baby into her seat and carried both toward the kitchen.

  When they reached the doorway, they found Fawn at the stove, pouring gravy into a bowl. Jackie laid a hand on Dixon’s wrist and quietly said, “You don’t know how much I wish I’d been more like her when I first had you. She’d have made the right decisions. Just look at her. So capable and responsible.”

  “She seems...strong, helpful.” Beautiful, kind, loving, wise...

  “From an early age,” Jackie confirmed, sliding into a chair. “It’s how she was raised.”

  “How who was raised?” Fawn asked, carrying the bowl to the table.

  Jackie just smiled, and Dixon said, “Somebody taught you how to cook.”

  “Can’t work at a diner without learning how to cook,” Fawn said, “but Grandmother deserves a lot of the credit, too.”

  “Remind me to thank her,” Dixon said, placing Bella’s seat on the chair between him and his mother, the table being so heavily laden.

  “You could start by thanking God,” Jackie suggested, reaching out her hand.

  Nodding, Dixon clasped her fingers with his. Then he held out his other hand to Fawn. Her delicate fingers trembled slightly as they met his. He folded them into his hand, felt them calm and warm, bowed his head and began to pray. Something he hadn’t felt in a very long while stole over him. Peace. A true measure of real peace.

  * * *

  They enjoyed almost twenty-four hours of complete amity. Fawn had never seen Jackie at such peace, and at the same time she seemed to lose strength with alarming rapidity. She bloomed whenever Dixon was around, and he exerted himself to be charming and kind, calling her “Mom” and “Mama” and playing with Bella, who flirted shamelessly, wiggling her eyebrows and cooing at him. As soon as Dixon left, however, Jackie languished, spending much of her time napping. When Fawn helped her bathe on Monday afternoon, she was alarmed at how thin Jackie had become, despite her swollen ankles and knees.

  Fawn hated to disturb the harmony by talking to Dixon about his mother’s failing health, but she knew that she must. Unfortunately, the weather turned unexpectedly in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, and they woke to find sleet pelting every surface. Dixon rushed out to hay the cattle in the field and returned a couple hours later with a red nose and a concerned air to phone the local veterinarian, who was already making calls, according to his wife.

  “Trouble?” Fawn asked as he pocketed his phone.

  Nodding, Dixon pulled out his gloves again. “Got another pregnant heifer in the barn. This one’s coughing her lungs up, and the vet can’t get here for hours.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He shook his head. “No clue.” He stopped and looked at her. “You got any ideas? That stuff of your grandma’s has worked wonders on that wound. I expect the vet to ask about it when he sees the improvement.”

  Thrilled, Fawn bit her lip to hide her smile and tried to think. “Do you have a vaporizer?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “A boiling teapot then? And camphor?”

  “There’s a teapot in the cabinet over the refrigerator,” he said, “and camphor’s in the medicine cabinet, but the stove’s in the house and the cow’s in the barn.” He snapped his fingers. “I’ve got a camp stove.”

  “You set that up. I’ll bring the teapot, camphor and extra water.”

  “There’s a tap in the barn, and it won’t be frozen.”

  “Excellent.”

  He hurried off to set up the camp stove. She ran to tell Jackie that she would be out of the house for a while and why. With Bella in her crib and Jackie resting comfortably in the bed in the same room, Fawn rummaged through the medicine cabinet, grabbed the teapot and threw on her coat. She found Dixon in the barn setting up the camp stove just outside the stall near the heifer’s head.

  “Hopefully the camphor can get into her lungs without burning her eyes,” she said, preparing the pot.

  He nodded. “I’ll hang around long enough to make sure. I can always put blinders on her, if necessary.”

  With the filled teapot on the flame, Fawn joined him at the fence wall of the stall, pushing up the sleeves of her coat. “I hope she’ll be okay.”

  “Me, too. I can’t afford to lose heifers and calves.”

  “Wish I could do more.”

  He shot her a weak smile. “You do more than enough around here. Sometimes I wonder what we’d do without you.” Suddenly he turned and looked her over. “Say, where’d you get that coat? You’re pretty cute in it, but it’s not a woman’s coat.”

  “No, it’s not.” Smiling, she snuggled down into it. “Harry gave it to me. I got caught at work one day pretty much like today when nobody expected the weather to turn. I was ready to dash to my car and shiver in the cold until it warmed up, but Harry wouldn’t hear of it. He took the coat off his own back and gave it to me, insisted I keep it when I remarked that it was warmer than anything I’d ever owned.”

  “He really was a special guy, wasn’t he?”

  “Absolutely.” She lifted her shoulders, snuggling a little deeper. “I’ll always treasure this old coat.”

  Dixon slid a hand to the back of his head, pushing his hat forward as if to hide his expression. “Wish I hadn’t been so stubborn and could’ve gotten to know Harry.”

  “What’s past is past,” Fawn counseled, realizing as she said it that she would do well to heed her own words. Wasn’t that essentially what her grandmother had been trying to tell her about her father? Her sister might not agree, but what kind of sense did it make to let her father’s weakness overshadow their lives forever? It was one thing to learn from past mistakes, but it was another to let the past control the present and the future.

  She took a deep breath and said, “I need to talk to you about your mom.”

  Dixon looked down. “She’s losing ground, isn’t she?”

  “I’m afraid so. We’ll keep praying, but she needs to see a doctor. Soon. If she keeps going as she is, hospice will need to be called in, and that will require a doctor’s assistance.”

  Gulping, Dixon said, “I wonder if we can even get hospice care out here. She might have to go to a facility in Ardmore or Duncan.”

  “I know she’d rather be here with you and Bella.”

  “I’d rather have her here.”

  Well, that was definite progress, so Fawn decided to take the conversation a step further.

  “She’s made it clear that she wants Bella raised in the country like she was. I’ve promised her that if I wind up raising Bella, I’ll find a way to keep us in the country. Honestly, I can’t imagine preferring to live in town, even a small town.”

  Dixon’s jaw had dropped, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You would consider raising Bella?”

  “Seems to me I’ll have to if you aren’t considering raising her yourself.”

  He clapped a hand over his mouth then shoved it over his face, pushing back his hat. Obviously, he hadn’t thought through to the logical conclusion with Bella, given his mother’s health prospects. Fawn wanted to believe that was because he couldn’t quite face the idea of his mother’s death yet, and she was trying to give him time to come to terms with it. Finally, he shook his head. “I...I don’t see how I could possibly raise her. Not alone.”

  “Single men and women raise children all the time, Dixon,” Fawn pointed out gently. “It’s not easy, I’m sure, but they find ways to make it work.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, “but...” He shook his head. “I’m not like you, Fawn. I’ve never had to care for another person in my life. I used to tell my grandpa that I’d always take care of him, but then one day he got mixed up and took too many blood pressure pills and died before anybody could get to him. It was horrible. And at the same time a part of me was relieved, because I don�
��t know how I’d have managed if I’d really had to take care of him.”

  “You were barely more than a boy then,” she pointed out, “and look at all you’ve accomplished since. I see what you’ve done, and I’ve heard your plans and it all shows great strength and promise, Dixon, especially when most men your age are out blowing every cent they get their hands on. You can do this. If you want to.”

  He just stared at her, until she turned and walked out, trudging back to the house. Had he really not considered what would happen to his baby sister once their mother was gone? Or had he just assumed that Bella would go into foster care and that no one would expect him to step up and take custody of her?

  Fawn couldn’t believe that he could be so callous as to consign his baby sister to foster care. Maybe he thought she’d be better off adopted. What Fawn wanted to believe was that, however hostile he had seemed at first, Dixon loved Jackie and couldn’t quite face the possibility of losing her yet. So far, he’d made sure that Bella had everything she needed, and he regularly interacted with her and Jackie now. Fawn instinctively felt that, deep down, he loved them both and would step up when the time came. He just needed a little more time.

  What Fawn feared most now, truthfully, was that she might be falling in love with him, and the wisdom of that remained very much in question.

  * * *

  The vet didn’t show until nearly lunch. That gave Dixon time to think. As usual, Fawn was correct. He should be the one to raise Bella if something happened to his mom, but he couldn’t imagine how he could swing raising a baby on his own.

  Suddenly, he had some idea what his fifteen-year-old mother must have been faced with when he’d been born. Later, as a seventeen-year-old single mom...she must have been overwhelmed, even with her parents to help her. And all these years he’d listened to his grandmother’s criticism and punished her for not being the perfect mother. He felt a shocking shame about that now, but some hurt and resentment over his mother’s behavior lingered. At some point, shouldn’t she have started thinking about him?

  As predicted, the veterinarian had been interested in Fawn’s grandmother’s home remedy, and he’d praised Fawn’s ingenuity. Dr. Burns politely turned down an invitation to stay for lunch, however, saying that his wife was home cooking even as they spoke and would blister him if he failed to show for the meal.