Chapter Twelve #2
“Yes, three identical sons. Brandon Massey and I had a few too many shots of Jack Daniel’s a month after you and I broke up.
I was rebounding, and he and Sabrina were having trouble, which is no surprise.
Angels straight out of heaven couldn’t live with her, so .
. .” She shrugged. “I knew he was engaged and that we shouldn’t even be flirting, much less falling into bed, but it happened.
When he found out about the babies, he promised to support me any way he could, but since then .
. . well . . . we kind of fell in love. He’s broken up with Sabrina now, and we’ll be going to Vegas to get married in a couple or three months. ”
Tina figured that even though Sabrina had blamed her for everything, she damn sure couldn’t blame her for Yolanda’s pregnancy. Tina hadn’t even been in town when that happened.
“I had to pick up a few last things in Tucumcari, where I’ve been teaching school for a couple of years,” Yolanda went on to say.
“And now I’m on my way to Amarillo to join Brandon.
I don’t know what the gossip will be around here, but there will be enough to set the town on fire. I just wanted you to know the truth.”
“Thank you for that, and congratulations. I hope you and Brandon are very happy,” Walker said.
“Thank you. I had a big crush on him in high school, and he says that he’s always wanted to ask me out,” Yolanda admitted.
“It’s crazy how things work out. If I hadn’t been angry with you and he hadn’t been upset with Sabrina, we would never have gone to that bar on the same night, and now we are being rewarded with a family.
I wish you and Tina the same happiness.” Her phone buzzed and she looked down, startled.
“I’ve got to go. Brandon has been calling or texting me every hour to check on me. Bye now.”
She left behind an awkward silence that lasted for several seconds.
Tina finally managed to get a few words out of her mouth. “Roof all fixed?”
“Yep. Ready for lunch?” he asked.
“Starving, but I guess we won’t be ordering Mexican.”
“The food would be waterlogged if we did,” Walker teased, but it fell as flat as his tone.
She could tell that Walker was nervous, probably due to Yolanda’s parting wish for them. But maybe the awkwardness was all coming from her, since he had no idea what Yolanda had told her earlier. Did he have feelings for her? If so, why didn’t he speak up?
He turned and started back toward the office. “I guess it’s ham and cheese sandwiches, then.”
“Or maybe barbecue, if we want to walk down the block to where the food wagon is parked today,” she suggested.
Walker did an abrupt pivot. “I’d forgot about it coming on Fridays. We’ll close and take an hour for lunch.”
She hurriedly grabbed her purse from under the counter and followed him outside. He locked the door and then chuckled down deep in his chest.
“What’s so funny?”
“Bull never closed for lunch, but I don’t ever—not one single time—remember very many customers between noon and one o’clock.”
“And that’s funny, why?” she asked.
“It just hit me what we could do with our free hour.” He nodded toward the huge metal rooster lying on its side in the parking lot. “I’m surprised that you haven’t thought of the same thing. We always could read each other’s minds.”
“After watching Cleo and Mae fighting with Iris in a mudhole last night, I’m trying to be an adult. But . . .” She smiled, glad that the awkwardness had passed and they were back to being friends again.
“But you really want to load that metal beast up and set it on Iris’s porch for praying that our house would be blown away, right?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah,” she answered. “Then put out the word that it’s at her house and interested parties need to go by her place to claim it. She’ll have people coming and going at all hours. Since Cleo and Mae have kittens, giving her the rooster would be the neighborly thing to do, don’t you agree?”
Walker raised a dark eyebrow. “Iris is at the Chamber of Commerce today making sandwiches for the people who showed up to help clean up the damage on that end of town. Cleo and Mae are at the church doing the same thing for the folks who are working on the west side. That means if she blames them, they have an alibi.”
Tina walked over to the rooster and stared down at it. “It would be an absolute shame to waste an opportunity that Madam Fate has given us. She might punish us if we don’t give this poor bird a new home.” She bent down and picked up one side. “Are you going to help me or not?”
Walker grabbed him by the tail, and together they put him in the back of his truck, and he covered it with a tarp. “Sleep well, Mr. Rooster. You will have a new home soon, but I got to admit that I feel really sorry for you.”
“Why?” Tina asked.
“He never did a thing to me except land in my parking lot, and here I am giving him to a woman who will hate him.”
“If she doesn’t like him, she can always chop his head off and make dumplings out of him. As for me, I vote that we set it up in the mudhole where the fight went down,” Tina said as she slid into the passenger seat and fastened the seat belt.
“My idea exactly,” he agreed with another chuckle. “But we’ll have to be careful or else we’ll be the ones wallowing in the mud.”
“Fast and careful. My two best attributes.” Tina giggled.
“I remember,” Walker said as he started the engine and drove away from the parking lot. “Trouble has always been your middle name.”
“Thank you for providing me with a good solid alibi too many times to count.”
“Hey, we were together, so I didn’t lie,” he reminded her. “But I would have if I hadn’t been right up in the middle of whatever you were doing. And, honey, you would alibi me out of a situation just as quickly as I would you or Gracie.”
He parked in the alley behind Iris’s house, and between the two of them, they hoisted the eight-foot-tall rooster over the chain link fence and dropped it on the other side. But the stupid thing’s comb raked down the metal fence and sounded like fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
“Holy hell! I hope Iris didn’t decide to come home for lunch,” Tina whispered.
“We’re safe.” Walker cupped his hands together and motioned for her to use them to help get over the fence. “If she heard that noise, she would already be out here with a loaded shotgun.”
Tina put her foot in his hands and grabbed the top of a fence post, but it was wet. She lost her balance and started falling backward. Walker caught her butt in both his hands and hoisted her right up and over into the yard.
“Now, would you please open the gate?” he asked.
“If you are so sure she’s not home, why are you whispering?”
“Not taking any chances,” he answered. “When the gate is open, we’ll have an escape route.”
Tina giggled out loud and felt the laughter all the way down to her belly. “I can see the Instagram story now: Old Lady Kills Two for Trespassing.”
“Or Woman Shoots Chicken. And the subtitle would say Ricochet takes off her right boob.”
Tina covered her mouth, but that didn’t contain the laughter. She threw the bolt on the gate, but when she opened it, all the giggles dried up. “Another squeaking noise. I swear she’s kept it like this on purpose.”
Walker slipped inside. “We’ll have to close it so she doesn’t suspect anything.” Like a soldier on a black ops mission, he eased over to the house and peeked around the back corner to make sure the coast was clear.
“We’re good to go,” he said as he jogged back to where the rooster had left scars on the fence and picked up the tail of the brightly painted metal critter.
“You know I’m going to get the blame, so I might as well have the game.
” Tina grabbed the head, and together they hustled it around the house to the place where the mud-wrestling had taken place the night before.
“Okay, we have to stand on either side of the puddle,” she said, “and then push his feet down into the soft mud.”
Walker helped her get the rooster in position, and then the two of them pushed on his back. The mud puddle sucked his feet right down, leaving him standing tall and proud once again.
“You do realize that the hot sun is going to bake the earth into concrete,” Walker said when they had finished the job. “There’s no way that she will be able to get him out without help.”
“Good. Maybe Sabrina will help her and can get some dirt under her fancy fingernails, or maybe even break a couple of them. Maybe Iris will think about how hateful she has been to Cleo and Mae, and not be so crabby anymore,” Tina said.
“One would hope.” Walker opened the back gate for her, then closed it when they were in the alley.
“I’m glad that all I had to do was slingshot you over the fence, and that I didn’t have to try to jump over it this time.
My bones paid the price for doing that when I had to pull those women apart.
I could hardly get out of bed this morning. ”
“Getting old, are you?” she teased.
“Even if I am, you’ll never hear me admit it.”
Cleo and Mae looked ten years older when they came home that evening after spending the whole day volunteering at the church. Poor Mae limped across the yard, and Cleo hung on to the porch railing when she climbed the stairs.
Mae walked slowly over to the edge of the house.
Iris’s house was set a little closer to the street than theirs, which was why they’d been able to get into a fight in the backyard in the first place.
“What the hell is . . . Sweet Jesus, Cleo. Did you hire someone to put that thing in Iris’s backyard? ”
“What are you talking about?” Cleo asked and walked down to the end of the porch. “What’s in Iris’s yard? I’d laugh if I had the energy, and no, I did not do that. But if I’d thought of it, I would have.”
Walker eased up out of one of the rocking chairs with a groan. That fight took it out of all of us. “Looks like the rooster has a new home. Maybe Iris wanted it all along.”