Excerpt from LAIRD OF DESTINY
Wicked…
I’m a wicked, wicked girl, and I know it.
I got it into my head that I wanted to go spend the summer with Cousin Mary in Scotland, and I knew Daddy wouldn’t let me go, come Hell or high water. So I figured I’d just have to make him want to send me.
And what would make an over-protective papa like mine want to send his daughter as far from home as humanly possible? A budding romance with the most undesirable pick of the Wyoming litter, of course.
Teddy Martin.
Poor Teddy. I don’t think he knew what hit him that spring.
His daddy was a drunk. His mother worked at the Pine Lodge, which was really a bar, but kids weren’t supposed to know that.
Most people I knew would rather die than confess their menfolk were at a bar, but saying your daddy’s down at the Pine Lodge wasn’t embarrassing because kids weren’t sure what went on in a lodge.
On the other hand, it was embarrassing to admit your mother even had a job—didn’t matter where she worked. So Teddy had two strikes against him. Because of his parents, people didn’t expect much of Teddy; maybe that’s why he didn’t seem to expect much of himself.
When I sat down under Teddy’s usual tree, spread out my poodle skirt, and opened up my lunch one April day, he jumped to his feet like he thought I’d brought a bee’s nest to nibble on.
It took me five minutes of whispering to him to get him to sit back down.
Another five to get him to smile at me—though it wasn’t very convincing.
And by then it was time to return to class.
I felt real bad he didn’t get his lunch eaten.
He probably cursed me for the rest of the day, every time his belly growled, but how else was I going to plant that first seed, I ask you?
Since that first seed needed a little water, I didn’t go straight home from school that day.
I held back so the girls I usually rode with had no choice but to leave without me, or they’d get their own butts blistered for getting home late.
Then I took a nice leisure-like walk out around Donny’s pond—we don’t remember what it was called before Donny Golightly drowned in it.
Donny, thank heavens, wasn’t anywhere to be seen that day.
Now, I chose that route because, when I told people later that I missed my ride and took the shortcut around Donny’s pond, no one was going to believe me.
First of all, it wasn’t any shortcut, and second of all, even the older boys aren’t brave enough to walk around Donny’s pond alone, even in daylight.
And this was all due to the fact that Donny supposedly got restless from time to time and made an appearance.
I was far too determined to get to Scotland to let a lonely ghost bother me.
I confess, I’m not easily scared. Daddy says money will do that to a person.
Mother says it’s alcohol. And they should know.
My father, Thomas Nimmo MacKay, was a Scottish engineer who never spoke enough for his brogue to be catchy.
He hit oil just where he’d figured it would be.
Mother hit alcohol with the same confidence, but she wasn’t a drunk.
Drunks drank in bars and hid out in alleys, like in the movies.
When I got home that day, I told our cook, Gay, where I’d been.
She told my mother, of course, since she was the unofficial liaison to my parents.
My mother, Laureli Waterford MacKay had, by then, heard the news about me eating lunch with Teddy Martin.
Gay’s report added the necessary water to the seed, and a fine little horror story had sprouted by the time my father got home from the oil field.
Of course, neither my mother nor my father would have taken the time to consult with me, to ask if any of that particular horror story were true. That just wasn’t done. Facts were facts. No need to check ‘em.
I was informed, by Gay, that I was to keep away from Teddy Martin for the rest of my life, or until I was dead, whichever came first. My parents, like always, thought a good stomp on a weed from an expensive pair of shoes was all it would take to make the thing shrivel up and die.
They just didn’t know how many more seeds I had in my pocket.