Home At Last Chance (Last Chance #2)(5)
Author: Hope Ramsay

“Her daddy’s a bull rider from Wyoming,” Tulane said out loud. That ought to cool Momma’s ardor. A bull rider wasn’t nearly as high-toned as forebears who came over on the Mayflower.

“A bull rider, really?” Momma said, turning in her seat to give Sarah another measuring glance.

“Dad was born in Wyoming and grew up on a horse farm,” Sarah said. “It was natural that he would ride rodeo.”

“Well, I’ll be. We have a nice young man named Dash who grew up on a horse farm in Texas before he came to live in Last Chance. We’ll have to introduce you.”

Tulane glanced in the rearview again. “Honey,” he said to Sarah, “don’t you let the Christ Church Ladies Auxiliary try to match you up with Dash Randall. That boy is the baddest boy in Allenberg County.”

“Really? And what does that make you?” Sarah shot back with a little gleam in her eye.

“The second baddest,” he said, forcing a grin to his face.

Their eyes met in the mirror, and his heart rate spiked.

Uncle Pete looked feeble. He’d always been bald on top, but now his head was a big pink dome covered by skin so pale and translucent that Tulane could see the veins.

Tulane hated seeing Pete like this, reclining in his living room when he ought to be down at the hardware store. Tulane hated the lineup of medicine in white bottles that stood on the buffet in the dining room. He hated sitting here in the matching recliner, trying to find some positive sign in his uncle’s pale and sunken face.

He needed something to hold on to. Pete had always been his anchor. Back when he’d been thirteen and in deep, deep trouble, Pete had pulled him from the brink.

“So,” Pete said in a whispery voice. “Your momma dragged you home, huh?”

Tulane squirmed in his chair. How was he supposed to answer that question? It felt like someone was pulling a string attached to his belly button. He was scared that if he said anything his voice might waver.

“Well, I’m glad you came, anyway. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Tulane turned and really inspected Pete for the first time since entering the room. He had to grit his teeth. His uncle was at death’s door. “If you’re going to start talking about the pink car, Pete, I’d just as soon not.”

“Son, I don’t know why you’re letting the color of your car get to you. Last weekend, you didn’t drive smart. I could see that on the TV.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not as easy as it was when it was just you and me and Bubba working on a car. I’ve got a team manager, a crew chief, and an engineer who looks down his narrow little nose at me on account of I only have a high school education and he’s a college boy.”

“And you’re letting that get to you?”

Tulane shrugged.

“Son, you are the driver of a Cup car. You have reached the highest place you can in your profession. You need to grow up.”

Tulane closed his eyes. This was not a new refrain. Everyone said he needed to grow up. He wasn’t entirely sure what folks meant by that.

“If you mean I have to sit back and let my jerk of an engineer do stupid things and hold my tongue about it, well then, I’ve learned how to be really mature.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what?”

“You man up, and you tell your engineer that you have a different opinion.”

“Ha! They don’t listen to me, Pete. They are like bullies on a playground—my engineer, my sponsor, all of them. I’m just the driver, and a rookie at that. I’m supposed to do what they say and keep my mouth shut. That’s what they think being grown-up means. I hate to complain, but you know that old story about being careful what you wish for?”

“Jeez, Tulane. What? Are you afraid to succeed?”

Tulane stared at his uncle. “What the hell does that mean, anyway? People throw that around like it means something. I’m afraid to fail. Okay, I said it. Happy?”

“No, I’m not happy. And I do believe that a man can be afraid to succeed. You have a chance of a lifetime; don’t screw it up.”

“Look,” Tulane said. “I can’t stay too long. Momma’s entertaining my advance person, so—”

“Advance person?”

“Yeah, well, she’s more like a nursemaid. Although quite frankly, she’s not terribly competent.”

Pete cracked an eye. “Nursemaid?”

“Yeah, a cute one, too, with freckles and a Boston accent. Her family came over on the Mayflower.”

Pete snorted. “Boy, you are in some serious trouble.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, it serves you right.” Pete sat up in his chair, and the recliner moved with him. “You listen to me, Tulane. You have talent. And you will be a huge success if you would just get out of your own way. Pride is one of those things that can ruin a man. You just remember that, you hear?”

“You’re not the one who has to wear pink.”

“You win races, and nobody’s going to think twice what you’re wearing. You quit messing around and show those people what you know and what you can do on the track. I’m getting tired of watching you lose. And even more tired of watching you behave like a jerk. I taught you better.”

Pete’s body might be wasting away, but the spark was still in his eyes. Pete loved to win. To Pete, winning was everything.

Pete continued in his hoarse voice, “You want to stop folks from laughing at you? Then you buckle down and behave like a serious driver.”

Tulane nodded. Pete was right, of course.

“Okay.” Pete leaned back in his chair. “Now you go on home, and you treat your sponsor’s people with respect, you hear me? And you work on winning races.” Pete turned and stared hard at him. “You do that for me.” He nodded once and then brought his head back to rest on the chair’s high back.

Pete closed his eyes. His lecture had clearly taken every ounce of strength he possessed. Tulane sat there for several minutes, feeling emotions he didn’t want to explore or even name, until his uncle fell asleep.

Ruby and Elbert Rhodes lived in a single-story white clapboard house with a wraparound porch. A flower border of early-blooming lilies ringed the foundation, while an old wisteria twisted up the porch trellis and gave the house the air of a Tuscan retreat. A row of rocking chairs with chintz cushions made Ruby’s house the model for a sappy Hallmark greeting card.

Sarah took off her suit jacket and rocked in one of those rockers, while an old-fashioned porch fan whispered from above. Ruby headed for her kitchen to work on supper, and Tulane took off in his brother’s pickup to run errands, which included visiting his sick uncle and hauling her luggage over to the neighbor’s house.

Being left alone allowed Sarah to think about the mess she’d made of her career. She might have gotten Tulane to his personal appearance on time, but fainting had to be pretty high up on the unprofessional scale.

No doubt Steve Phelps would hear about it, and it would make his day. It wasn’t a crime to faint, but Steve would find a way to make it seem like a crime, because Steve wanted her gone.

He had good reason to want her gone, too. The downward spiral in Sarah’s brief career had started when she had foolishly believed that Steve would give her credit for writing the Cuppa Java marketing plan. But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d pretended that his meteoric rise within the marketing department had been earned on his own merits.

That had hacked Sarah off. Her brilliant plan for getting even was to write a supremely stupid marketing memo about a pink car and baby-changing races and put Steve’s name on it. Deidre was supposed to take one look at that memo and realize what a poseur Steve really was.

But instead, Deidre had taken the memo seriously.

Now Steve was in charge of the pink car program and Sarah had been sent here to do an impossible job, and to come face-to-face with the implications of the memo she had written.

This proved one thing for certain: Sarah sucked at revenge, just like she sucked at everything else a modern businesswoman needed to excel at.

Steve was going to find a way to get her fired. It was only a matter of time.

Her dark thoughts were interrupted some time later by a little voice that asked, “Are you really a Pilgrim?”

Sarah opened her eyes and found herself staring at a little girl in a pink sundress with something that might be ketchup smeared on its yoke. She wore a pair of Little Mermaid sandals that exposed grubby toes. Most of her honey-colored hair had escaped her pink ponytail elastic so that it framed her face in a slightly sweaty tangle. She gave Sarah a sly smile. Her top front teeth were missing and the new ones—too big for her face—were just making their first appearance.

“Hello,” Sarah said.

“Are you? ’Cause Granny says you came on the Mayflower. Didn’t the Pilgrims come on the Mayflower?”

Sarah blinked a few times. She must have dozed off. She felt groggy. “Uh, yes, the Pilgrims came on the Mayflower. But that was a long, long time ago. I didn’t personally come to America that way. I was born here.”

The little girl cocked her head, studying Sarah closely. “My name’s Haley, what’s yours?”

“Sarah.”

The girl swayed there for a moment, screwing the toe of her sandal into the floorboards, as if weighing whether to continue. “Are you Uncle Tulane’s girlfriend?”

Sarah almost choked.

“Are you?” the girl asked before Sarah could stop sputtering. “ ’Cause I heard Granny on the phone saying that even though you have no fashion sense and are a Pilgrim, she thought you might be perfect, except for the fact that your daddy is from Wyoming. Is Wyoming up north?”

“Uh, no. And perfect for what?”

Haley shrugged. “Don’t know, ’cause I only heard Granny’s side of the conversation. She was talking to Miriam Randall. Where’s Wyoming?”

“Out west.”

“So you’re not his girlfriend?”

“No. Tulane and I work together.”

“ ’Kay. So, do you have a boyfriend? Are you married to anyone else?”

Sarah wasn’t sure where the little girl’s mind was moving, but she didn’t like the direction. “Nope.”

“Really?” The girl’s eyes grew round. Clearly the little girl was too young to understand that a match between a northern Presbyterian and a Southern Episcopalian would be viewed in some circles in both Massachusetts and South Carolina as marrying outside the faith.

“You wanna meet my daddy?”

Oh, so that was her game. Daddy must be divorced.

“Well, I—”

“Daddy’s the chief of police,” Haley said, then leaned in like a conspirator. “He’s a widower, you know.” She leaned back and nodded in a way that suggested she’d been peeping at keyholes and listening to her grandmother gossip with the other ladies in town. Clearly, there was a move afoot to find someone for the widowed chief of police. Probably without much success given the fact that Last Chance, South Carolina, appeared to be a place where eligible females younger than sixty were scarce.