Jake didn’t answer right away. He finished his cigarette and put it out in an ashtray on the stand. The coffee still sat there, getting cold. “It could just be cysts.” He told her all of it, his try for a reduced sentence, Peter, the surgery. “Goddamn it, Dixie, I should be with her and I can’t be.”
“Well, you must really trust this Peter Brown if you let him take your wife to Oklahoma City and look after her.”
Jake took her hand, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. “I have to trust him, because he’s all I’ve got. Because this job is a sentence and not by choice, I have to take care of business, and Randy can’t wait for that surgery. They said the sooner, the better, because if it is cancer, they might be able to catch it in time.”
“Then that’s what you have to hope for, Jake.”
He closed his eyes. “With my luck?”
She squeezed his hand. “You have two beautiful children and two grandsons, and you’ve had Randy for a lot of years. I’d say that’s pretty damn good luck for a man with your background.”
He smiled sadly, leaning his head back.
“She’ll need holding, Dixie, and he’ll be the one holding her when she’s afraid or hurting. And I’m scared to death she’ll die down there without me. I couldn’t live with that. Grandkids or not, I couldn’t live with that.”
“Yes, you could—for her. She’d never want you to do something crazy and not be there for your family, who will need you more than ever, if it’s the worst.”
“But she’d still be gone.”
Dixie didn’t answer him. She just sat there beside him and waited. For several minutes he said nothing. Finally he leaned over, wrapping his arms around her middle and resting his head in her lap. He held her tight…and wept.
Twenty-seven
Jake tied his gear onto his horse. “Did Jeff stay the night with that cute little Rosie?”
Lloyd shoved his shotgun into its boot. “He sure did,” he answered with a grin. “And if you’d come to the room we were supposed to share last night, you would have known about it already. I don’t want to think the worst, Pa, but I never saw you the rest of the night. And you were awful quiet at breakfast.”
Jake rubbed at his eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Lloyd. You don’t honestly think I’d do anything to hurt your mother, do you—especially now that she’s sick? Dixie and I just talked. That’s all. You ought to know me better than that.”
“I do know you, and sometimes you get kind of crazy when you’re worried about Mom. I’m not stupid. I know you’ve done crazy things before when you thought you needed to prove you could live without her.”
Jake sighed. “Didn’t you notice at breakfast this morning that Dixie was wearing the same damn dress she wore last night?”
“I never thought about that.”
“Well, that’s because she never took it off. Nothing happened, all right? Dixie’s a good woman. We talked…a lot. I fell asleep and she let me lay there because she knew I needed to sleep. That’s all there was to it.” He mounted up and rode Prince around the house, calling for Jeff. “Time to go, Jeff, if you can tear yourself away from the cute little gal in your bed!” he shouted.
“Oh my gosh!” The words were heard through an open window of an upstairs bedroom. “Don’t leave without me!”
Lloyd laughed and mounted his horse.
“You have no more than ten minutes, Jeff,” Jake shouted up to him. “You’d better be down here or we will leave without you. We need to make time getting to Hell’s Nest!” He rode Prince a few yards from the house to calm the restless horse.
“I’m coming! I’m coming!” Jeff yelled from upstairs.
Dixie came out carrying a burlap bag. She handed it up to Lloyd. “Fresh-baked bread. You make sure your father eats plenty. He never ate last night and not enough this morning.”
“Thanks, Dixie. Go tie it onto the packhorse, will you?”
“Sure.”
“Dixie. Is he okay?”
“I’m not sure. He did a lot of crying last night, Lloyd, and don’t you dare let him know I told you. He needed somebody to talk to, and he knows you’re too close to it. So he came to me.” She walked over to the packhorse and began tying on the sack of bread.
Jeff came flying out of the house then, still buttoning his shirt and carrying his leather jacket and gun belt on his arm. Rosie came running after him with his hat. She plopped it on his head and leaned in to kiss him. “You come back, sweet boy,” she told him.