The Influence(3)

Ross parked next to a dusty pickup in front of the house. He’d promised to be here for lunch, but he’d left later than he’d planned and the journey had proved longer than expected. It was now after two. He hoped they’d eaten already and hadn’t been waiting on him.

Lita emerged from the house, alerted by the slamming car door as he alighted from the vehicle. She greeted him with an excited squeal, running up and throwing her arms around him in a big hug. Dave, her husband, stood shyly on the porch.

Lita had barely changed in the decade since he’d seen her. Her hair was shorter and lighter in color, but even a life lived outdoors had put no wrinkles on her face, and he was suddenly conscious of the fact that he’d chubbed up quite a bit in the past year.

“It’s so great to see you!” she enthused. She nudged his belly with an elbow. “Put on a few pounds, I see.”

“Junk food’ll do that to you. Junk food and stress.”

“Speaking of food, I’ll bet you’re starving. Or did you eat on the way?”

“No. The trip was a little longer than I thought.”

“I should’ve warned you about that. Come on in.” She led the way up the porch steps. “You remember Dave.”

Ross shook hands with Lita’s husband, who smiled and said, “Nice to see you again.”

The two of them had eaten, but Lita had made gumbo and kept it warm in a crock pot. Dave, a big man, said he was hungry again and joined Ross as he ate. Lita drank iced tea and reminisced with Ross about places no longer there, like Legend City and the below ground movie theater in Los Arcos mall. Laughing at the memory of their visit to South Mountain’s Mystery Castle, where the tour guide had forbidden an overly curious Ross from asking any more questions, she admitted that she’d never had a subsequent summer vacation as fun as the ones she’d spent with his family.

“Why did you stop coming?” he wondered. “I never understood that. Money?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Partly. But my parents weren’t getting along much then, and it was kind of the beginning of the end. They got divorced when I was fifteen, and after that I lived with my mom and the problem was definitely money.”

“I missed you,” Ross said.

She smiled, put her hand on his. “I missed you, too.”

She asked about the rest of his family, his parents, his brother and sister, and he told her the truth, the unvarnished version.

“I never liked your sister,” Lita admitted. “That’s why I always hung out with you and your brother. Although him I could take or leave, to be honest with you. Maybe because he was older than we were. He always seemed like he was doing us a big favor just by gracing us with his presence.”

“That was Rick. Still is.”

“Remember that time you two got in a fight and you sprained your wrist?”

“I remember.”

“What was that thing you always used to say when you were trying to be tough? ‘I’ll kick your ass to pay for Friday?’”

Ross laughed.

“What did that even mean?”

“I have no idea. I just thought it sounded cool.”

“It made you sound like a dork!”

“Well, what about you?”

“What about me?”

He tried to come up with a corresponding embarrassment for her but couldn’t do it under pressure and gave up, laughing. “All right. I was the dork.”

Ross was glad he’d come, and after finishing his late lunch, he was taken on a tour of the house and property by Lita and Dave. It was indeed a ranch and even had a name, the L Bar-D. Dave, who’d grown up in Sonoita, the son of a cattleman who’d gone broke and made a midlife career change to become a postal worker, dreamed of owning a herd of cows. At the moment he and Lita had only a horse, a goat, several hives of bees, which provided the organic honey they sold, and a coop full of chickens, which supplied the eggs from which they received most of their admittedly small income.

“But we don’t need much,” Dave insisted. “We live simply.”

Beaming, Lita took her husband’s hand. “And happily.”

The shack where they’d lived while the house was being built, and where Ross would be sleeping, was to the left of the chicken coop and much cuter than the word “shack” had led him to believe. A prefab structure they’d bought and put together themselves, it was basically set up like an efficiency apartment, with a counter separating the small cooking space from the living/sleeping area, and a closet-sized bathroom containing a toilet, a sink and a narrow shower. Lita had kept the place up—like a guestroom, Ross supposed—and he had to admit that it was pretty nice. He even had a view of the open desert through the front windows.