A Wild Red Rose (15 page)

“Look, Renee. It’s only Walmart. I’ve seen worst-dressed women every time I’ve been in the place. If I must to go in alone, you’ll have to take whatever I pick out.”

“I’m not wearing any panties.”

“Don’t try to tell me this is the first time you’ve ever gone commando in a public place. I know you too well. Hell, half the time you don’t wear anything under your jeans.”

“It’s this dress. It bells out straight from my breasts. I look like I weigh two-hundred pounds. If a wind comes along, everyone will see—”

“Fine!” Clint stalked off leaving her in the Nelle.

He returned a hot half hour later and tossed a plastic package into her lap. “Now you have panties. You wouldn’t believe the checkout lines in there. I tried the self-checkout, but it wouldn’t accept my card.”

“You are probably overdrawn.” Renee tore through the plastic with her nails and held up a pastel pink pair of stretch-cotton bikini panties. She had a selection to choose from. The bag also contained panties in pale yellow, light blue, and mint green. She selected the mint green pair, took off her boots, and shimmed into the panties.

“I hope they fit. I got stretchy ones.”

“Clinton O. Beck, are you saying I’ve gotten fat?” Her eyes weren’t that sharp, green glass color anymore, but Renee could still stare a man down and make him feel an inch tall.

“Nope. I’m saying I’m not going into the bra department, so if you want one, you’d better get out of the car.”

Renee put her boots back on and slid out of the Nelle. They trekked across the huge concrete parking lot giving off heat like a griddle and into the vast, air-conditioned space of the big box store. Renee headed straight for the clothes, snatched jeans from a rack and a few tops as Clint followed behind. She detoured through underwear and picked up boxes of bras, next stop the dressing room. He waited by door. A few minutes later, the jeans came flying over the top of the divider.

“Clint, these don’t fit. Get me another style.”

He looked at the tags. Size six. Over at the racks, he picked out an array of jeans in size eight and carefully tore off and pocketed the tags.

“Here you go, honey.” He shoveled them under the door.

“Still snug, but better. You have a good eye, Clint.”

“That I do. You need more tops?”

“I always need more tops. Pick out some you like.”

He got a few of the ones with crisscross tops and high waists in blues and greens, a pale gray edged with white lace, and one wild swirling lime and hot pink print right out of the seventies. None of them fit tight, but they would show off her breasts without revealing too much skin. After all, their next stop was San Antonio and a visit to his mother.

Renee exited the dressing room carrying a mound of clothes but still wearing the watermelon dress. “If they weren’t so hard on shoplifters here, I’d wear an outfit to the checkout. As soon as this stuff is paid for, I’m changing in the restroom.”

Clint piled the purchases in a cart abandoned by a rack of cheap purses and started toward the front of the store.

“Wait, wait! This straw bag matches my hat.” Renee tossed it into the cart. “It’s kind of cute for the price. They have some nice things really cheap.”

“Right. What’s another $19.95?”

“Are you sure you can afford all this if your card is no good?”

“I’ll write a check. And my fucking card is good! It was just the damned machine.”

“Now who is the grumpy one?” Renee said, cheery so close to being decently dressed again.

They lined up behind a large, blonde woman with a gap-toothed smile and three small, tow-headed children, all clamoring for candy and bubble gum from the rack of impulse buys. As the clerk swished a huge sack of toddler pull-up diapers over the scanner, the woman asked Renee in a twangy voice, “When ya due, darlin’. You got that glow.”

“Due for what?” A waxing, a dye job, a better haircut, what? Renee shot her a perplexed and unhappy glare.

“When’s the baby due, sugar? Gonna be a pretty one if that’s your man.”

“I’m not pregnant,” Renee responded coldly.

“My mistake.” The fair woman colored up and turned her attention to prying a Slim Jim sausage from the toddler’s hand. The other two kids dumped chocolate bars and gummy bears packets on the counter. The mother put back all the chocolate, swiped her card as fast as she could, signed, and made her escape, the children following her like little yellow ducklings.

“Clint, do I look that bad?”

“It’s the dress, Tiger. It does bell out. Forget about it. We need to hit the road to San Antone. I told my mama we’re on the way.”

Renee could not forget. Not when they veered off in Amarillo to cut across central Texas, not when she started seeing signs for Dallas and thought wistfully of shopping in Neiman Marcus, not even as they approached San Antonio, and her hands grew cold at the thought of meeting Clint’s mother. No one took Renee Niles Bouchard Hayes home to Mama, even if Mama was just plain folks. If she
did
have a bun in the oven, she did
not
want to know about it right now. Enough stress ahead once they arrived at the family grocery store. Had Clint once told her the Becks lived above the business? Terrified about the meeting, she couldn’t quite recall. Her nausea returned. She slowed their travel with numerous demands for pit stops, but inevitably they reached San Antonio. Passing right through the city as quickly as she’d lost her lunch at a rest stop, they popped out into ranch country on the other side. Maybe Clint wanted to show her the site he’d picked for that doublewide trailer he wanted to buy. Any reason not to meet his family sounded good to her.

Chapter Fourteen

Clint brought the battered old Nelle to a stop before a high adobe wall pierced by double wooden gates carved in an intricate, lacy Moorish pattern. To Renee, the entrance appeared as if it pre-dated the Alamo. Clint pressed a gadget on his key ring. The gates swung open on very modern hinges. A paved road wound up a low rise where a sprawling house sat overlooking a wide-bedded creek holding only a trickle of late summer water. Renee knew enough about landscaping to realize the native oaks, clumps of yucca and cactus, and beds of wildflowers gone to seed had been artfully placed to enhance the setting and hide a number of outbuildings. The late afternoon sun turned the clay walls of the Mexican-style hacienda a rich red-gold.

“You live here, Clint?” she asked.

“Rarely.”

“I thought your father had a grocery business.”

“He does. This place belongs to my mother’s family, the Hidalgos. Before we go up there, I should tell you I really
am
the Bean King—the Bean Prince, actually.”

“You mean you are related to these people? They let you visit?”

“Any time I want. I’m heir to the whole damned Beck’s Beans empire.”

Renee’s hazel eyes widened with shock. A dozen harsh questions settled bitterly on the tip of her tongue. They were prevented from escaping by their arrival at another gate, this one of open ironwork allowing a glimpse of a tiled courtyard with a charming fountain surrounded by twelve small stone lions spewing water into its center. Brightly glazed pots of red geraniums circled the fountain and ornamented the sides of cement benches set to take advantage of the shady areas.

An elderly dog, a golden retriever mix, rose up from a cool corner and gave a single “woof” as Clint pressed the key ring again and swung the gate open. The dog waddled over on painfully arthritic legs and collapsed on Clint’s toes. He squatted and rubbed her behind the ears.

“How’s it going, old girl?” The bitch drooled happily on his running shoes.

“Is that any way to greet your mother, Clinton?” said a small but regal woman appearing in the doorway to the house. She had dark hair liberally streaked with white and pulled back into a classic bun at her nape. Her smooth olive complexion’s only wrinkles were the deep laugh lines aside her mouth and merry crinkles surrounding her dark brown eyes. Renee knew for a fact that Madalena Beck had to be past seventy, but she hardly looked her age.

Clint swooped his mother up into his arms and spun her around as he had Mabel at the truck stop, but a little more carefully. “No, this is how I greet you, Mamacita.”

“Stop, stop, you make me dizzy!”

Wagging her tail and barking, the old dog got up to join in the fun. Renee simply stood there waiting—for what she wasn’t quite sure—an introduction, an explanation?

“And you must be Renee. Welcome to Hacienda Hidalgo.
Mi casa es su casa
.” Madalena Beck’s gold bangle bracelets clinked as she took both of Renee’s hands and squeezed them lightly with her beringed fingers. Her dangling filigreed earrings swayed as she turned toward the house.

“Let’s get out of the heat. We’ll have a light dinner, then talk the night away. I am so sorry that Clinton’s father is away on business. If we had been given more notice, he would have been here to meet you, my dear.”

To inspect her, Renee thought, as she followed Mrs. Beck’s low but stylish shoes, and simple but expensive red silk dress, down a dim hallway. They passed carved chests and niches filled with chased silver vases full of fresh flowers and the images of saints on their way. Arriving at a large room where a stone fireplace filled one wall, Madalena Beck gestured to wide, comfortable sofas draped with serapes and a low wooden table set with small bowls of tapas, a pitcher of lemonade, and an open bottle of red wine resting in a cooler.

Clint popped a black olive into his mouth and poured a glass of Pinot Noir. He gestured with the bottle toward Renee. She shook her head ‘no’ and accepted a glass of lemonade to soothe a suddenly very dry throat. Gulping down wine wouldn’t help with first impressions.

“Please, sit and have something to eat,” Mrs. Beck said with a gracious gesture toward the offerings.

As Renee sank into one of the sofas, the snap on her new light blue jeans gave way with a pop that Mrs. Beck pretended not to hear. Renee smoothed the gray jersey top with the lace edging that had been hanging in a Walmart that morning away from her stomach.

She wasn’t good with mothers, not her own, not anyone else’s. Gerry’s mother had been dead, of course. Elias became a heart surgeon because his own mother died prematurely of a heart attack. But, those she had met when seeing other men took one look at her and surmised “slut.”

Aware she no longer looked slutty in her very new jeans, almost-demure top, and the black boots she’d worn so often they were scuffed on the toes, gave her a tad of confidence this woman wouldn’t condemn her immediately. She wore her only adornment, the silver cuff bracelet, all the rest gone in the fire. At least, she’d had the time to shower off the soot and the smell of ashes from her hair this morning while Clint photographed the husk of The Tin Can with his cell phone and arranged for a tow truck to take it to the junkyard. After the trip to Walmart, she’d returned the watermelon dress with a sincere thanks to Mabel and a silent ‘good riddance’.

Okay, she also belatedly thanked Miss Franny of The Hair Affair for a good cut that could be styled with a cheap comb purchased at the truck stop depot and left to dry in the sere New Mexican air. Scavenging around the store, she’d found some cherry-flavored lip balm, but little else to improve her appearance. Sure, they had disposable razors and shaving cream, but completely lacked eyeliner and mascara. She knew of female truckers. They should broaden their stock. If only Clint hadn’t rushed her in Walmart, saying his mother would put them up for the coming night and awaited their arrival. They had a long drive ahead of them. Let’s go! Now she met this ageless little woman with her own face naked and showing freckles, flaws, incipient wrinkles, and all. Made her want to hide behind her hands.

Yeah, halfway across Texas was a long drive with only a break at an exit with nothing to offer but gas and fast food. All their rest stops fell in the middle of nowhere, and she’d had to go several times. Just once, he could have stopped in a town. But, no! So, here she sat facing Clint’s obviously rich and well-kept mother with nothing more than cheap clothes, a clean face, and shiny, cherry-flavored lips.

Renee felt sick with anxiety. She scooped up a bite-sized empanada and nibbled on the edge to settle her stomach. A puree of beans and melted cheese filled the center, which had a small, jalapeno zip to the taste.

“These are very good, Mrs. Beck.”

“Lena, you must call me Lena. I am so glad you like them. All of the appetizers are from my cookbook.”

Great, Clint’s mother turned out to be a gourmet chef, too. Renee thought she’d been doing well to add a can of drained Beck’s kidney beans to their luncheon salads for variety. Sometimes, she dumped in Beck’s garbanzos and tuna. Speaking of which, a tempting chickpea dip with a hint of garlic and a small pool of olive oil sat ready to be scooped up with triangles of flat bread on the table as well. Renee tried the dip while Mrs. Beck beamed at her. At least, she could show some appreciation by eating.

“Did you have a good trip today?” the elegant woman said, obviously trying to make her guest feel at ease.

Renee swallowed the gob of dip on the end of her flatbread. “I burned down the trailer this morning,” she blurted out. “That’s why I look this way. All my clothes are gone—and my make-up.”

“There is nothing wrong with the way you look, my dear. You are absolutely glowing. But a fire, oh my! I’m glad neither one of you got hurt. Clint, have you contacted the insurance company about your motorcoach?”

“Umm,” said Clint around a mouthful of chickpea dip.

“Swallow,” his mother prompted.

“It was only The Tin Can.”

“Snuffy’s trailer? I thought you were driving the Belly Nelle, but I couldn’t imagine why.”

“We traded off a while back. I guess I’ll sign mine over to Snuffy to make it up to him and get myself a new rig. The old one probably isn’t habitable by anyone else but him by now. Might fly to my next stop in Ellensburg to save the time.”

“But why the trade?”

Renee stood abruptly. Sick in the morning and ravenous at night, she wanted to snatch up a handful of empanadas and run from the room. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Beck. This day has been awful for me. I have a terrible headache. If I could go to my room, I’ll lie down for a while.”