The Real Thing Read online

  Keith Black probably could’ve married any horse-loving woman he wanted after his ex-wife ran off without so much as a good-bye, but, instead, he picked up his broken heart and chose me, a farmer’s daughter who likes fancy things and is afraid of horses. Keith says I look pretty cute in a cowgirl hat and my favorite fringe suede vest, but despite a closet full of denim that he says hugs me in all the right places, I don’t have a cowgirl bone in this body. Now, Keith, on the other hand, is the real thing, trophy belt buckle and all, and there I was, leaving him standing back at the altar with a bunch of eligible cowgirls in the audience while I ran away like a filly.

  I couldn’t help but ask myself if I was doing the right thing. While it’s true, I could’ve given all those former rodeo queens in the crowd a lesson in hairspray and makeup, I didn’t know the first thing about being a rodeo cowboy’s wife. Even the way all those capable cow people sitting on hay bales trying so hard to make me feel like I belonged with them made me doubt myself. They had no idea who I really was inside, or what I was running from when Keith found me. What I was still running from, I reminded myself, pumping my legs faster.

  Watery silk rode up my thighs as I stretched my legs into a sprint, but no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t shed the slithering at my knees. I ran faster, farther away from the wedding party, yanked off my hat-veil, and, for a moment, I dismissed the wedding altogether. I was a sun-kissed, fourteen-year-old girl, slipping through the orchard so fast that Marta couldn’t keep up. I have always been fast. Even now, as I sped further away from the wedding, blossoms blurred past in pink streaks on either side. I didn’t even bother to tuck in the strawberry-blonde curls that had slipped out of their pins. Marta would fix them when I got back, and I did plan to go back. They all realized that, right?

  Hopefully, my groom, who I assumed still stood with that puzzled, but not truly surprised expression on his tanned, cowboy face, framed by a black Stetson atop that thick, peppery blond hair would wait as long as it took, but I couldn’t be sure of a lot of things anymore. Nobody could. This fact occurred to me as I rounded the end of the row, stopped abruptly, and leaned with my hands on my knees. My chest heaved. I have to admit, it’d been a long time since I ran like that. In fact, it would have been easy for Marta to catch me if she’d wanted to follow, and considering that she might have, I peeked around the end of the row.

  No Marta. They’d sent Peyton after me instead. She was headed my way, the purple-jeweled cell phone she would never part with pressed so close to her face, I worried she might trip. That phone never ceased to annoy me. It had an old voicemail from her mother that Peyton played every night. Peyton had only been a little girl when she received that voicemail, but she checked that old phone several times a day, just in case her mother called—a hope she liked to cling to, but that was about as likely to happen as me getting on a horse. At least I hoped so. It gave me chills just to look at that phone, but getting her to accept a new one, or to put it away on my wedding day, was obviously too much to ask.

  Ignoring the anger, or was it jealousy, the phone provoked in me, I reached under the hem of my dress and caught the edge of lace clinging to my skin. I was a grown woman and I wasn’t going to give a woman who’d run off and abandoned her family another moment of thought on my wedding day.

  “Oh, heavens to Betsy,” I called to Peyton. “You should have stayed back with your dad!”

  My soon-to-be stepdaughter paused to stuff the phone inside her pretty turquoise boots and then dragged the toes, scraping them through the orchard toward me and I caught my breath. Not because I was mad about the boots, but because that child had no idea how gorgeous she was with her short, breezy peach-colored sun dress against her olive complexion. ’Course, if I told her, she just would’ve argued in that fourteen-year-old girl way and there was certainly no time for that. The closer she got, the more I could make out the pout on her pretty mouth. Was the flush in her cheeks from the unusually warm, spring day or from being singled out in front of everyone at the wedding to go find her stepmother? I’d bet on the latter for sure.

  And who thought that would be a good idea?

  My dad. It had to be Daddy.

  I wished I could meet her halfway and place my arm about her shoulders, but she wouldn’t have liked that. Instead, I focused on working my dress up over my hips while I waited for her to catch up. When she came around the corner, she gaped as if I’d just chomped into a rotten apple I picked up off the ground and offered her a wormy bite. She even gagged a little bit for effect. I was obviously the most appalling person on her planet that day.

  “What are you doing?”

  I just ignored the snotty tone that’d been saturating her speech for the past few months. It was my wedding day. Nothing, except for that stupid slip, could steal my joy. Besides, she had a reason.

  “I just can’t bear to wear this old, ratty slip,” I said, shimmying right out of the flimsy yellowing piece of silk I’d put on that morning without even considering its history.

  “People actually wear those?” she asked. “I thought they were for old ladies.”

  I chose to ignore that comment and how it pointed out that I wasn’t a spring chick anymore. But I was no old lady either!

  “I’ll be rid of it in a second.”

  “What on earth are you thinking?” she asked. “Dad’s waiting for you.” She jabbed her palms out for affect, shook her head back and forth, and abruptly crossed her silver bracelet adorned arms across her chest. What a little drama queen. All I can say is that she’d be fantastic in the local theater if she weren’t so shy. But the kid had a point.

  What in the world am I thinking? What would Keith think of me? I’m over thirty. I shouldn’t be running away from my own wedding. I should be over this. A slip was just a piece of flimsy fabric.

  Only it wasn’t. I would explain it to Keith later.

  I’m not the least bit superstitious –well, okay, just a bit, but even I know something like a little slip can’t bring a person bad luck. It was more the sadness attached to it that bothered me. Not to mention, it was on the tattered side. I couldn’t believe I’d let it get that way.

  That very morning, I’d sat at the breakfast table in the same old slip and camisole I’d always worn with dresses without even thinking about it. And when Marta slipped the antique lace and silk shift we’d made from our late momma’s wedding dress over my head, she’d not even noticed the slip and only told me how beautiful the dress was. And it was. I loved how it stopped below the knee, but was still short enough to set off the rhinestone-studded boots Keith’s mother had given me.

  “You look like the bride of a bronco rider, sis.” Marta’s hot pink lipstick grin made me believe it, too, at least for a few minutes. They’d gone to so much trouble making my wedding day to Keith different than the first one, and boy was it different with all that western wear. It wasn’t until later, walking through the sea of cowboys and cowgirls toward Keith, who looked dapper in his black Stetson and western cut tuxedo, that I remembered my slip’s origins.

  “Holy cow,” I muttered, the slip’s thin fabric suddenly heavy, scratchy at first, and then catching like plastic wrap around my hips.

  I can’t wear this.

  How could Marta not have noticed? How could I have even put it on? Habit, I guessed, but I didn’t want it on my body now—not minutes before marrying Keith.

  I’d had that dumb slip forever, long before Keith was in my life. I distinctly recalled receiving it as a gift at my first wedding shower, a drab event with pink and green mints and tart red punch. That slip had stretched with me through all of my failed pregnancies, remarkably snapping back to hang on my hips during the empty months that followed, and later still to the private funeral of my daughter, Sarah, who survived for a few minutes as if God had breathed into her tiny lungs and then sucked her life right back up to heaven. But it wasn’t only those memories that bothered me about the slip. I’d also worn it when I married Sarah’s dad, the same
man who divorced me for someone skinnier, more beautiful, and more fertile. And did I mention skinnier?

  I held the slip out between my finger and thumb, studying it as if it were a piece of somebody else’s random clothing plucked off the ground. In a way, it was. I wasn’t that girl anymore. Heck no, I hoped I wasn’t that girl anymore. I doubted Keith would have liked that girl either, and I doubted he’d like this slip on my body.

  “So, I take it you’re not wearing that? You might have thought about that this morning.” Peyton raised her pretty eyebrows and I couldn’t keep from smiling. She was suddenly mothering me?

  “No. I am not wearing this old thing. No way, no how, young lady.”

  “But, I thought you liked vintage things.” She narrowed her gaze. “You said they have good feelings attached to them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know what that has to do with the price of tea in China or with my wedding day.”

  She huffed and looked at me like I was the only one being difficult. “You’re always getting rid of my mother’s stuff and replacing it with all your vintage stuff. Is that her slip, too? Where’d you get it?”

  I flinched, careful not to lose my omelet on her pretty cowgirl boots as I imagined wearing her deadbeat mother’s slip. Gross.

  I was about to say something about her attitude when I recalled a particularly intense argument that resulted from my trying to remove a certain lavender velveteen couch of her mother’s from the ranch house. It had made no difference to Peyton that her mother abandoned her along with the couch, or that the sofa was the ugliest thing this side of the Mississippi. She’d kicked the shabby chic piece I’d replaced it with and told me how much she hated all of my old junk. Never mind how all that discarded junk was made new by my own hand, so that it could bring happy memories to new owners who don’t mind paying a pretty penny at The Southern Pair. Still, understanding how an object can have so much meaning to a person, particularly a little girl who has lost her momma, I promptly removed the couch from my project room and put it in Peyton’s already crowded bedroom.

  “Of course this is not your mother’s slip, Peyton. And I do love old things, but this slip—it doesn’t have any good feelings attached to it. Trust me.” I couldn’t bring myself to explain why.

  She rolled her eyes to the tops of the trees, looking every bit like a brat, but I didn’t have the heart to fight with her. Granted, Peyton was a bit spoiled by her father. But let’s be honest. Truly spoiled little girls have mothers who dote on their daughters and who don’t run off and leave them to care for their little brothers and cry themselves to sleep at night. It’s as if Violet Black – oh! I dislike sharing a last name with her – just vanished, and left Keith to pick up the pieces of Peyton’s heart. Who does that?

  At first, everyone had thought Violet was a missing person, but when the divorce papers came from the lawyer, her family and friends were devastated in another way. She’d rejected them all, choosing anonymity, baffling those who’d believed her to be a loving mother and wife. Only heaven knew why she really ran away and gave Keith everything, including full custody of the children. Sometimes I wondered…did she take anything at all? A photo of the kids? Some trinket to remember them by?

  My heart broke a little more for Peyton as she took a great breath and let me have it.

  “I figured it was just one more thing of my mother’s that you needed to toss,” she said, jabbing her finger at the slip.

  I felt like she was jabbing me, but it was okay. The slip was gone and I was me again.

  “Dad already told me we have to get rid of mom’s stuff so you can feel at home.” She stared me down and I noted tears gathering in her eyes. “But it’s our house.”

  Whoa. I placed my hand gently on her arm and she shrugged it away. Peyton was about to have a meltdown. Thank goodness she didn’t know I’d heard that conversation between her and her dad about my getting rid of their old stuff. I’ll never forget how hurt I was when I rounded the corner just as Peyton was raising her voice to a very frustrated Keith. His glance had passed through the kitchen when I peeked in from the hallway and our eyes locked. Understanding the warning in them, I’d backed away, but not so far that I couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation.

  “You can’t get rid of Mommy’s stuff!” Peyton cried. “It’s special!”

  I remember thinking Peyton didn’t understand that not everything in the house was associated with good feelings, at least not for Keith, and not for me.

  Peyton was breathing like she was hyperventilating, something I noticed she did when trying to get her way with her dad, and when she got her way, she became perfectly normal again. If I’d ever tried that with Daddy, well, I never would have. Kids know what they can get away with.

  “Yes, we can,” Keith said, despite her gulping inhalations. “Like these dishes.” He’d walked to the cabinet and removed a plate of her mother’s sacred china ringed in a wide circle of purple. “Maybe Manda would like to have her own plates, and not your mother’s.” His voice, tinged with that cowboy drawl, had deepened to a warning tone.

  I’d cringed, my frustration with Violet’s old things notwithstanding. Keith was saying the absolute worst thing, even though it had been true that I was tired of having Violet’s stuff everywhere in my new house. Everywhere! I was tired of her rodeo queen crowns, photos of her atop thoroughbred horses, and her trademark purple and violet decorations all over the house. I hated walking past trophy cases and feeling pops of anger that rang in my ears, and every time I picked up a lilac colored coffee cup, I swear the coffee tasted bitter. But now, seeing the pain on Peyton’s face, I regretted my complaining. All of Violet’s things reminded Peyton of her mother, and she was afraid of forgetting.

  I’d decided I could probably keep her mother’s tacky china if it made the kids happy, but before I could intervene, Peyton had rushed forward. She wrenched the plate from his hands, and in her clumsiness knocked it to the floor. It clattered and rolled at first, looking like it might simply rattle safely to a stop. I sucked in a breath and held it, pleading for it not to break, but a dull thud and a crack splitting the air as the plate broke in two was the only answer to my fervent prayer for Peyton’s mother’s plate.

  I slowly exhaled, allowing muted images of ultrasound photos I kept hidden in an old family Bible, a flash of blue pen scraping my name across the bottom of divorce papers, a vision of Daddy on his knees in the hospital chapel when Momma was dying whispered through my mind, all reminders that maybe God likes to break things more than put them together. I added the image of Peyton’s crumpling face as she lunged for the broken plate.

  A breeze swept through the orchard and lifted the hems of our wedding day dresses. Peyton looked like she might laugh as she pressed her skirt back down. Warming at the sudden change in her disposition, I wanted to reach out to her, brush her hair from her cheek and adjust her cowgirl hat, but my dad strode toward us. Wise-looking and slightly wrinkled in his bolo tie and western hat, he let Peyton clasp his arm.

  “Grandpa Marshall!”

  Cue the sweet, old man come to rescue the princess from the evil stepmother.

  “What’s going on?”

  Peyton held her palms out in a grand gesture. “Manda’s trying to get rid of her slip.”

  He eyed the slip, me, and Peyton. I was ready to rush into his arms myself, tell him what a big mistake I might be making, how the kids were never going to accept me as a stepmom, and how I was never going to fit into Keith’s adventurous rodeo life. I couldn’t do that, of course, not in front of Peyton. But he knew. He held up a finger with a slow wink while he placed an arm around Peyton and ushered her a few paces away.

  I leaned over to dust off my boots while he whispered something in her ear. She beamed, then saluted as if he were the chief who just bestowed some great honor on her before she ran back to the wedding party. Only then did he take my hand.

  “She loves you, Daddy.”

  “She loves you, too.�
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  I bugged my eyes at him, doubting the truth in his words.

  “Just like you love her,” he said, placing his arm around me.

  “That much is the truth,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Peyton won’t ever believe it. She thinks I’m going to be the wicked stepmother from H-E-double hockey sticks.” Daddy looked like he was going to disagree with me, but a squawking bird drew our eyes.

  “Dratted crows,” he said. The oily-looking black birds were always a problem.

  “What did you say to get that smile from Peyton?”

  Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “That’s between me and Peyton.”

  “Fine.” I swiped at a stupid tear.

  “Now, Amanda,” he said, using my full name the way he had when I was a teenager looking for advice – or getting grounded which was often the case, and justified, too. “It’s not that she doesn’t want you. She just doesn’t want to forget her mom.”

  My chest ached. I couldn’t help it. Why did that woman have to keep coming up in the middle of my wedding day?

  “Now that’s just the truth, Manda. We can’t get around her missing her momma on a day like this. Her life is about to change again.”

  And this day was proof that her dad was never going to be with her mom again. Not that it could’ve ever happened anyway, since nobody knew where in Tennessee, or anywhere else, that no good woman was.

  I waved my hands to keep my eyelashes from dripping. “Do you think she’ll ever get over her mom and accept that I’m in her life now?”

  “Depends,” he said, giving me a knowing look. “Do kids ever get over losing their momma?”

  “Never,” I said, almost erupting into tears, but there was no way I was going to ruin all that mascara. I sniffled. “So, at least tell me what you said to make her smile like that.”

  “I promised her a date with grandpa while you and Keith are on your honeymoon, just me, her, and Nashville. I’m sure Marta can keep Stevie.”