Chapter 2
Chapter Two
“You want me to what? Mira, look. I’m not going to meet some man that’s not even the boy’s father.” Sam Marrón’s head was fixin’ to pop off his shoulders and fly into the damn stratosphere. “If he was a good papa, he’d be here, trying to help his boy.”
“?Orele! Papa, he’s sick. He’s been all hurt.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “Max is trying to do the right thing.”
One of his eyebrows climbed right off his forehead and into his hairline. “Trying to do the right thing would have meant not getting my baby girl pregnant, no?”
“Daddy, I was there. The whole time.” She only called him Daddy when she was really upset. “I was totally involved in the whole situation. I might love him.”
“Ai, you’re eighteen years old. What do you know about falling in love?”
“What did you know about falling in love when you were with Mama?”
Well, honestly, not a whole hell of a lot, but that wasn’t the point. He’d been trying to get a job with a bull fighting crew, and he’d needed to have a beard at the time. So he’d found a girlfriend, and he’d done what teenagers do.
But that was neither here nor there.
She was pregnant now and here, not then and there.
“Well, I want you to meet with him anyway. Max says this guy is like his uncle, right? His Tio Evan. And he’s the one who is helping Max with all his hockey stuff, so it’ll kind of be like meeting with his papa.”
He locked his lips and counted to ten before he answered, because he needed to be patient.
She wasn’t going to get any less pregnant any time soon.
So, they did need to deal with it. And this Max kid, even if Sam wanted to pop him like a zit, had at least come back down when Hillary had called him and told him the news.
“How long is he in town? You know I have a job this weekend.”
“He says he can stay for ten days. He’s been here for three, so another week. You’ve got time, and I can see him over the weekend.”
“You’re not working, this weekend? It’s the Rodeo de Santa Fe…” The purse was a good one.
She stared at him. “Papa? What if I trip and fall and lose the baby?”
Sam counted to twelve this time, and she started giggling, and somehow she was eight years old again, playing pranks.
“Besides, I’m working the rodeo with Dr. Pitcher, and then we’re having supper with Mama and Tanya.”
“What does she say about this whole thing? Is she meeting this boy’s tio?”
She shook her head. “No. She doesn’t even want to meet Max, really. She’s super no bueno mad at me.”
He understood that. He was pretty fucking mad too, but obviously he was hiding it better.
“She said I was a fool, and that I should have learned from her mistake. She called me a mistake!”
He sighed softly as Hillary’s eyes filled with tears. Valerie could be such a pain in the ass. She popped off with things she didn’t even mean, and she always had. “You know that she doesn’t mean that; she loves you dearly.”
“Maybe she’ll love the baby. It will at least be little and cute.”
“Stop it.” He didn’t need this on top of everything else. “So where do you want to meet them?”
“Well, can’t they just come here?”
“No, they cannot.” No fucking way. He was not having strangers, no matter who had impregnated his child, coming to the house. They could meet someplace.
Her lower lip quivered again. “Okay, but it’s going to be awfully awkward having this discussion in the middle of a restaurant or something.”
Jesus Christ. He was tired of being manipulated, but she was right. It was going to be super awkward, and he didn’t want this to be for public consumption. “Mi’ja, I am about at the end of my rope.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Papa, I just want you to be able to sit down and talk with them, and if it gets loud or weird, then…” She chewed her lower lip. “His uncle is staying at a hotel. We could go there, I guess, and meet at the hotel room.”
“Ee a la, that sounds better.” At least there they could control when they left, especially if things got weird and loud. Having people come out to the house to meet meant a guy couldn’t always get rid of them.
“Okay, you want to do it maybe Tuesday?”
“That sounds fine, baby girl. You set it up, and I’ll deal with it. You just tell me what time.”
“Okay, I’ll get us Dion’s or something.”
“Dios mio.” God save him from the idea that there always had to be food or something if you were going to have a meeting. That came from his mother, who believed that food made all things easier.
She gave him a tentative grin. “Okay, I’m gonna go call Max.”
Sam swallowed down his first reaction to that and his second before nodding. “You do that, mi’ja. And you make sure, though, that he knows I’m not happy.”
“Oh, Papa, you did that already.” She waved a hand at him as she walked off.
He unclenched his jaw, and it didn’t escape him that his teeth hurt really bad.
Having any kind of discussion at this point with his daughter was incredibly difficult because he wanted to yell at her, but it did no good; it just made her cry.
He couldn’t wait to see what happened when the real hormones kicked in, and she started crying every time somebody breathed hard on her, like her mom had.
Speak of the devil, his phone beeped and he looked at it, the text from Valerie right there.
What are you going to do about this?
He thought about calling her but knew he wasn’t ready to talk to Valerie right now either. So, he texted back.
That’s up to her. I’m meeting with them early next week.
Keep me posted.
I will. Don’t ever call her a mistake again.
Then his phone rang. He knew better. He should have kept his fucking mouth shut.
“?Bueno?”
“I did not call her a mistake.” She always started out like she could hold out, bringing up the main topic of discussion without even so much as a by-your-leave.
“Did you or did you not tell her not to fuck up her life with a mistake like you made?”
He heard her draw in a breath, and he knew the exact moment she realized what she had done. “Oh crap, I need to call her.”
“Yep, you sure do.” Suddenly he was in a slightly better humor.
He and Valerie got along fine. They always had.
He’d been the one with the weekend job, so he kept custody of Hillary most of the time, and Valerie had gotten weekends and every other holiday.
They weren’t evil to each other or anything; they simply had separate lives.
“Then why am I wasting time talking to you? You’re going to meet with the kid and his dad?”
“No, the kid and his adopted uncle or something. I don’t know. The guy who’s trying to get him to play college hockey and get him a pro job after that. Evan something-or-other.”
“I’ll look him up, okay, bud? I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got to call my girl.”
“Yeah, and I’ll just go wash my pits, so I don’t stink so bad, making everybody run off.”
“You do that, hombre.” She giggled, the sound almost like they were in high school again, and then she hung up on him.
Lord. He scrubbed a hand over his face trying to figure out what the hell to do now.
Sam didn’t know where this shit would go. What he really wanted to do was call his mama, but he knew Hillary hadn’t told her anything yet, and it wasn’t his story to tell.
So, he grabbed the phone and called the person he could think of who was involved in his life but also detached from the immediacy of his family here in New Mexico.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” Fellow bull fighter Kacey Wilson sounded pleased to hear from him, which was a nice change.
They’d had a little bit of a thing once upon a time, but now they were just good friends and they worked the same circuit, so they saw each other a lot.
“Hey, Kacey, my life has gone to shit.”
“And you couldn’t wait to tell me everything over a beer this weekend? That means it’s pretty damn bad, huh?”
The laughter in Kacey’s voice made him want to punch the guy in the face. But that was okay. Kacey often had that effect on him.
“Well, my girl gone done and got herself pregnant.”
Kacey groaned, and Sam could see him shake his head in his mind’s eye. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. Baby’s due at Christmas. I took her to the appointment.”
“Which cowboy we fixin’ to kill?”
God, he wished. That would be easy.
Sam scratched his chin and sighed. “Hey, that’s a problem, no? He’s not even one of ours. He’s a kid who came down for spring break. It’s all bad. He plays hockey. I don’t know.”
“Now, come on. She don’t even have enough sense to get with a cowboy?”
Sam started pacing, finally heading outside into the sunshine, moving toward the pasture gate. “I mean, I don’t know. He got money. At least that’s something, and he’s a good kid for all intents and purposes. At least he didn’t run. He flew down here, even, to talk to her.”
He couldn’t believe she had been so irresponsible. She was smarter than this.
The sand crunched under his feet, and he checked the water in the stock tank before thinking about it.
“Are they staying together?”
He shrugged even though Kacey couldn’t see him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know, man. She sure don’t seem like a girl in love.
He’s saying he’s going back up to wherever it is he goes, and she is not going.
She’s gonna go to college. She’s got a life here.
” And she wasn’t taking his nieto away, dammit.
“Besides, he ain’t asked her to marry him, no? You and I both know what that means.”
“Well, if he’s got money, you make sure he pays what she needs. What he has to.”
“Shit man, I know, I know. I get it.”
“You want me to come out early? I can tell my guy that I gotta go.”
“And leave him with the babies? No, I mean, would you? Come on, I mean? I don’t want anything—”
“No, no, no. This ain’t about that.” Kacey snorted. “Shit, we’re family. You know that I love Hillary more than is reasonable, so I’ll come. You let me stay?”
He rolled his eyes up to the sky. “Have I ever not let you stay?”
He didn’t have a fancy place, but it was good-sized and nice and solid. Had a great view of the Sangre de Cristos and enough acreage to run a couple of cows.
Hillary had herself some horses, even.
It was a good place. It even had three guest rooms because cowboys came and stayed for a while, without warning. Sorta like Grinch bags at Christmas.
Soon he guessed there’d be two guest rooms.
“Cool. I’ll come on, then. I got to tell my man, kiss my babies, but I’ll drive, so it will take me the day.”
“No problem, man. I just appreciate you coming.”
Kacey was over near Flagstaff right now, and he would no doubt stop at the Sizzler in Gallup. The man loved him a steak and a baked potato bar…
“You sound like you need some support, and God knows I need to look at your daughter and ask her what the hell she’s doing. How could she even be old enough to be thinking about this sort of thing?”
He sighed. “Yeah, I made myself not say that because, you know, she’s the same age that her mom and I were when we did our thing.”
“But still, you weren’t in high school anymore; at least you were working.” Kacey sighed softly. “Grandbabies are blessings, right?”
He chuckled watching the horses run around the pasture like the idiots they were.
“Yeah, a grandbaby is a blessing, and you know that I will love my nieto no matter what, but I wanted better for her. She’s my girl.
” His eyes stung with tears, and he swallowed hard.
“I wanted better for her, and I gotta tell you, no esta bueno. I don’t like it.
It’s taking everything I got not to scream. ”
“Sure it is, buddy, but it’s not going to help at this point. The screaming should have happened before she did the deed, not now. Now it’s too late; there’s a baby. You’re a grandfather. Are you gonna be Grandpa Sam?”
He was going to barf. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
He was not old enough to be a ‘uelito.
He was not.
“I imagine I will be his ‘Uelito.”
Kacey snorted. “I imagine so. Abue. I like it.”
“I don’t.”
“You will. All right. Give me a bit, and I’ll come help.”
“I’ll be looking for you tonight late.”
“I’ll be there.” Kacey hung up on him, and Sam put his phone away, puttering around to do the rest of the chores. He wasn’t sure how this was going to go, meeting this man along with Max, but he needed all the support he could get.
Now he just had to make it until Tuesday.