Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Sweetie
“Chicken-fried steak.”
Chicken-fried steak and grits. Ham hocks, salty greens, grape jelly. Ooo, pepperoni rolls, buckwheat pancakes, pawpaws, and fried mushrooms. Oh, how I miss Mama’s fried morels.
Driving alone down a lonely mountain highway, listing foods I’d eaten growing up, wasn’t making my seven-hour drive down to Wisper, Wyoming go any faster.
This foggy bullshit was a bitch, and my truck radio was dead.
My phone’s battery had just about kicked the bucket, and for extra funsies, my charging cord decided to quit today too.
I had a spare in my suitcase, but I didn’t feel like stopping to get it out of the bed of my truck.
Maybe if I counted off all the places I’d lived since I left North Carolina?
“Iowa… what was that place called? Fredman? Yeah, Fredman, Iowa. Middle of nowhere, Nebraska. North Dakota.” Ugh, I was getting frostbite just remembering that winter hell. Whoever made the movie Fargo hadn’t been far off the mark.
To the silence inside the cab of my truck, I said, “Lust, Wyoming. Now there’s a place I’ll never go back to.
Five cowboys to every woman per square mile, more cows than I ever want to see again in my life, and dirt.
Dusty, dirty foothills and vistas.” Lust was pretty in a barren-landscape kind of way, but I liked trees.
Coming from a dead-end Appalachian holler, trees were a necessity. I felt exposed without them.
Since I left home, I hadn’t lived in any one place longer than six months, but then two years ago, I found Sheridan, Wyoming, met my boss, Brand Lee, and he gave me a job.
He probably shouldn’t have. Until the day Brand offered his handshake and changed my life, I had no steady work experience.
Flitting between waitress gigs wasn’t what I considered a career.
I worked as a bank teller for a short minute, and I’d cleaned enough office buildings to be awarded a gold medal for being “that bitch who empties your trash cans and accidentally bumps your computer with her Swiffer but is never surprised to find a porn site loaded up. You know, the one you jacked off to during a muted conference call?”
But I knew how to build houses, knew how to fix and rig shit when it broke. And I had an innate ability to boss men around.
“Now that you came by honestly,” I told myself.
Before he broke his back and got hooked on pills, then ran his business to the ground, my daddy had steered a tight ship at our family’s construction company.
Even before he started showing me how to work the job, doing my homework in whatever build had been going up that month taught me to be a builder simply by osmosis.
And I watched and listened to my dad’s guys arguing about how to do something, which team played the best football, or who’d slept with whose girlfriend.
The answers to those questions were always: The way I told you to do it, Chicago (bear down!), and lastly, you’re all a bunch of morally defunct horndogs, and you’re probably all passing syphilis back and forth between each other with your girlfriends acting as the superspreader highway.
A bunch of grown men bickering and barking like a pack of prairie dogs got old fast. Figuring out how to put them in their place so they’d go back to work came naturally ’cause I’d grown up watching my dad do it.
Too bad it hadn’t worked on my ex-husband.
I could only hope that by now he’d fallen off the edge of a cliff or had contracted some rare, extra painful disease.
No, I didn’t wish him too much ill will.
I was relieved just to have gotten out when I did, and I thanked the Lord I’d had the sound foresight to not have children with Lincoln Louis Jr. If I had kids, my cross-country search for a new place to belong would’ve been a hell of a lot more complicated.
It made me sad sometimes, not being a mom. I’d always pictured myself as someone’s mama, but pushing thirty-five as a single, emotionally unavailable woman kind of made the whole motherhood thing difficult.
I didn’t aim to be emotionally unavailable, but running from your past and men who were weak or mean or just plain stupid always seemed harder when you wore your heart on your sleeve.
Changing my name back to Beatrice Baker before the ink had even dried on my divorce decree had been my saving grace. I was able to see myself again. Really see and feel the old me. I could look in a mirror and steel myself again to pain and loss and disappointment.
Was love really more important than strength of self? I used to think so, but in my recent experience, the answer to that question was no.
Never.
For too long, I’d been someone’s wife, which then made me a secondary character in the story of my own life. Nothing I did mattered as much as how everything I did or didn’t do or say affected my husband.
Utter fucking bullshit. But wasn’t I the dipshit who’d let it happen? Hadn’t it been me stuffing down my opinions and emotions to please a man who hadn’t considered once what might please me?
Unfortunately, it was how I’d been raised, and the loss of my only remaining parent after losing Mama at such a young age made me so fucking desperate to feel special to someone that I’d given up what made me special in the first damn place.
It hadn’t helped that all my daddy had left me was debt and pissed-off customers.
I’d needed my ex-husband’s family’s legal counsel.
His father owned a chain of dry cleaners.
Lincoln would inherit the entire empire when his parents passed.
Maybe they already had by now. I wouldn’t know because I left North Carolina almost five years ago and hadn’t looked back once.
Catching a glimpse of myself in my rearview, I asked my reflection, “Does that make you shallow? Are you a gold-digging asshole?” But my eyes were clear. My conscience clean.
I thought I loved Lincoln once upon a time. That had to count for something. And after we’d dug Daddy’s company out of its hole and sold all the equipment to pay off debts, I’d tried to make it work. I tried my hardest to be the wife my husband had thought he wanted.
It took way too long for me to realize I’d never be that woman, and finally, after ten years, I walked away. Lincoln and his family had been paid back in full, plus I’d left him some cash to ease his ego.
My ex was another reason I had been so surprised when Brand offered me a job.
Lincoln hadn’t wanted me to do anything besides waitress or stay home and clean, so technically, when I met Brand, I hadn’t been on a build site since I was nineteen and didn’t exactly have the credentials he’d been looking for.
I guess Brand had seen something in me. He must have since he paid for me to get recertified in a handful of skills I needed to freshen up, and then he set me loose.
He watched me work, watched how I interacted with the rest of the crew, and six months later, he’d titled me his number one, his foreman.
Two of the leads I’d met when I first started had threatened to quit because of my promotion, but Brand showed them the door.
He didn’t care that I was a woman. He wouldn’t have cared if I was from Venus. He only cared that I did the job right.
“Forewoman?” I nodded to myself in the rearview. “Yeah, I like that better.”
How was it possible that Brand was so kind and accepting, but his older brother Bax, who incidentally, I’d be living with for who knew how long, was a snarky pain in the ass?
Technically, I wouldn’t be living with him because Brand had hurried to finish and set up the smallest of the new cabins for me on his family’s property.
I’d never been there before, but I’d seen the blueprints when Brand had his architect draft them, so I knew the cabins were less than a mile from the main house where Bax and his daughter lived.
I wasn’t all that excited to see Bax every day until Brand finished dealing with the bullshit court case he’d been plagued with back in Sheridan, but I was a little excited to get to know Brand’s niece. When I met her on a Zoom call last week, Athena reminded me of myself when I was her age.
Too bad her dad was an annoying, poker-losing fuck twaddle.
A sexy fuck twaddle, but still. I’d only met him the one time, when I demolished his ass in a game of Texas Hold ’Em, but he was pretty drunk and, to be fair, no one beat me at Texas Hold ’Em.
I’d become too good at reading men’s faces.
They all thought they hid their tells so well, but excitement about winning anything, including poker and women, was so goddamn evident.
It was like a bright, flashing red light every single time.
Bax had a somewhat interesting tell; he licked and then bit his bottom lip when he had a good hand, and when he didn’t, he pursed those lips and swallowed. I’d had a hard time looking at anything besides his neck muscles flexing, Adam’s apple bobbing.
Still to this day, my reaction to the tall, annoyingly handsome single dad pissed me off.
But none of that mattered. He’d never apologized to me for the “sweet little ass” comment, and two years later, it still pinched under my skin, like a splinter you could see but couldn’t remove.
Back then, I knew Bax had been struggling with the loss of his wife, and it was the only reason the words “I’m sorry” had passed my lips.
Despite the playboy air he’d tried to give off the night we met, I understood where he’d been emotionally.
I saw a lot of my own dad in him, the aura of his loss of love and direction.
When Mama died, Daddy had tried to figure out how to raise a thirteen-year-old on his own at first, but he’d been just as adrift.
He’d lost the love of his life. Nowhere to go from there.