Winning Dixie Page 6

  “Oil,” Lopez said. “The last boom we had in the area put a lot of money in the town coffers. Got us a new firehouse, a new fire engine and a new fire chief. He gets a salary. The rest of us are volunteers.”

  “I hope you don’t get called out often,” Wade said.

  “More often than we’d like.”

  They announced Wade’s order number over the PA system. He shook hands with Lopez, then went to get his ice cream, that idea growing larger in his head. He was so preoccupied with it that he didn’t realize someone was directly behind him until he turned around and ran smack into Dixie.

  “Umph.”

  “Damn, Dixie, I’m sorry. You okay?”

  “Well I was.”

  What did that mean? She just stared at him. “What?”

  She laughed. “I’m sorry. I was kidding. I’m fine. I was just going to get a drink to go. We’re headed home.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  “Before you go…” She put a hand on his arm and led him a few feet away from the crowd around the pickup window. “I’d like to ask you a question.”

  The spot on his arm where her hand touched him radiated warmth. “Sure.” He imagined he could feel her fingers against his skin, even through the sleeve of his shirt. “Ask away.”

  Dixie frowned, trying to think of the best way to ask her question without offending or embarrassing him.

  To be honest, there were several things on her mind. He’d barely looked at her during the game. He’d sat on the other side of Pops and kept his attention on the field. That should have made her happy.

  It hadn’t.

  Of course, she hadn’t so much as said boo to him, either. Maybe she’d put him off earlier at the diner when she’d told him to get back to work. Maybe he’d taken her seriously. Thought she hadn’t enjoyed their flirting.

  Perhaps, she thought, she had enjoyed it a little too much. But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d flirted with a man she hadn’t grown up with. Probably because it had never happened.

  If only she knew him a little better. Knew who he was, what kind of man he was.

  “What’s on your mind, Dixie?” he asked quietly.

  She heaved a sigh. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but most single men your age wouldn’t be the least bit interested in hanging out at Little League games or ice cream parties.”

  “And you’re wondering why I’m here?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. I’m wondering.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “I’ve never spent much time—no time, really—in a small town like this. The sense of community…it’s very strong, and it’s everywhere. The sense of freedom, the slower pace of life than in the city. The quiet, even in a yelling crowd. I’m finding it fascinating. I enjoy the ball games, and I enjoy the large and small dramas that go on in the stands.” He shrugged and took a lick of his ice cream to catch a big drip before it fell. “I don’t know if I’m saying what I mean, but does it answer your question? I like being around families and communities. And I’m not going to the games to hit on you, just in case you’re wondering.”

  She blinked. “Oh, I thought…never mind.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I don’t know. I just wondered, that’s all. I like it that you enjoy hanging out with us.”

  “You do?” His pulse sped up.

  “How do you feel about fishing?”

  “I haven’t done any since I was a kid.”

  “We’re going Sunday after church. The boys and Pops and me. We’d like it if you went with us. We’ve got whatever gear you might need, and I’m packing a picnic lunch for us.”

  “How can I turn that down?”

  She had lost her mind. That was the only conclusion Dixie could draw after asking her dishwasher, for crying out loud, to a family picnic.

  Oh, my God, she thought. Did she really think that way? That a dishwasher somehow wasn’t, what, worthy of her?

  Dixie stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and slapped cleansing cream onto her face.

  “Snob. That’s what you are.”

  No. That wasn’t true. She was grasping at straws—as if his being her dishwasher, or any other employee, put him below her, beneath her—

  Beneath her. Now, didn’t that phrase conjure up a pretty picture in her head? Wade Harrison, beneath her. In bed.

  “Oh, good grief.” She smeared the cleansing cream around all over her face with jerky motions. What had she been thinking to invite him?

  You were thinking Carrie was right, you’ve got the hots for him.

  That, of course, was ridiculous. It had been so long since she’d had the hots for a man, she couldn’t even remember it. So what was it about this man that made her invite him into the bosom of her family, so to speak?

  Ah, there it was. A tightness in her chest eased. She wet her washcloth and started cleaning off her face. She hadn’t done it for herself, she’d done it for the boys. Because they liked Wade so much. Because they needed a good male influence now and then.

  Not that Pops wasn’t a great influence on them. A wonderful, loving influence. But he was their great-grandfather. He kept up with them, but every year it was getting harder on him. And he liked Wade as much as the boys did.

  She wasn’t expecting Wade to step into their lives and take Jimmy Don’s place. He wasn’t anything like her ex.

  Jimmy Don had been a lovable Teddy bear. If you looked up good ol’ boy in the dictionary, his picture would be there. He’d loved his sons, he’d loved her. He’d been her best friend since first grade.

  He had also been the most irresponsible adult she’d ever known. If there were checks in the checkbook, that meant, to him, that there was money to spend. After all, there was beer to be bought, wasn’t there?

  If the gas tank held even a drop of gas, then the tank wasn’t empty and there was no reason to stop and fill up, right?

  If the electric bill was due on the fifteenth, they didn’t really mean it. When the electricity inevitably got cut off, it was, “Well, hell’s bells, I’d been meaning to pay the bill. They shoulda known that. We always pay eventually, don’t we? What’d they have to go and cut us off for?”

  But as sure as God made little green apples, his rodeo entry fees never got paid late.

  Dixie had loved that irresponsible, lovable idiot her whole life, but she’d had all she could do to raise two sons, run the diner, keep house and worry about Jimmy Don breaking his neck riding broncs in some rodeo or another. He’d been as careless as he’d been good-looking. Finally, about four years ago, she’d had all she could take. Love him or not, she could no longer live with him.

  She knew she’d done the right thing for all of them when Jimmy Don hadn’t even acted surprised, and the boys barely questioned why Daddy was living out back with Pops now instead of staying in the house with them.

  Pops, Lord love him, had never held the divorce against her. He knew his grandson as well as anyone did. “Hell, darlin’,” Pops had said to her when she told him she was divorcing Jimmy Don. “I’m just surprised you put up with him this long.”

  She would always miss that big, lovable idiot, and she would never forget that last phone call he’d made to her the night he’d died. He’d been drinking, as usual, bragging about the great ride he was going to make the next day. His last words had been a plea for her to hug his “two best boys” for him. It was for those “two best boys” that she hurt the most over Jimmy’s death.

  She wasn’t looking for a new husband. She wasn’t even looking for a date. Just a picnic with her kids and Pops and a nice man who didn’t have any family in the area.

  “Oh, aren’t I the nice one.” She finished removing the cleansing cream, then rinsed out her washcloth. After wringing it as dry as possible, she shook it out and draped it over the shower rod. A dab of eye cream, a smear of night moisturizer, and she turned away from the mirror.


  “Dammit.” She turned back and glared at her reflection. “Okay, so he’s hot. So I want to be around him outside the diner. So what? He’s just passing through town. He’ll be gone soon. No harm, no foul.”

  He hadn’t said he was just passing through. Hadn’t mentioned any plans about moving on. He just had that air about him. That air of moving on. That big-city air.

  She gave herself a final glare in the mirror, then turned off the light. She’d invited him. What difference did her reasons make? What was done was done.

  Chapter Four

  Wade checked his hair in the mirror, then wiped his damp palms down the thighs of his jeans. It came as a shock to realize he was nervous. More nervous than the day he’d first walked into Dixie’s Diner, hoping to gather information about the boys.

  Years of board meetings, shareholders meetings, press and media interviews, the occasional congressional testimony—none of those held a candle to going on a picnic with James Donald McCormick’s family.

  His feelings for them were growing deep. He felt as if he’d known Pops all his life. Known, truly liked and bore a deep fondness for.

  He was attracted to Dixie, and had examined his feelings for her for days. In addition to attraction, there was respect, admiration, and a strong liking, different from what he felt for Pops. This was a man-woman liking.

  The boys…he didn’t have to examine his feelings for them. He flat-out loved them. No two ways about it. He didn’t think it mattered whether the feeling came from himself or from the new heart beating in his chest. The heart was his now. Whatever he felt, it came from him—Wade Harrison.

  The growl of an engine barreled down his quiet street and slowed to an idle in front of his small apartment.

  Dixie had told him not to bring anything but himself, so he stuffed his keys into his front pocket and stepped outside.

  They made a picture, these McCormicks, in their big, gas-guzzling SUV. Pops sat behind the wheel, Dixie rode shotgun. The boys leaped out of the rear side door, demanding that Wade sit between them. He settled in the backseat with Ben on his right, Tate on his left.

  “Good morning,” Dixie greeted.

  “’Morning. Where are we going?” he asked.

  “To our pond,” Tate announced.

  “Your pond? You have a pond?”

  Dixie glanced back at them and smiled.

  “It was our dad’s pond,” Ben explained.

  “Our dad’s quarter section,” Tate said. “Now it’s ours.”

  “Did he used to take you guys fishing at the pond? Your dad, I mean.”

  “Yeah, when we were little,” Ben said.

  “When you were just kids, huh?” Wade winked at him. “Are there any fish in this pond?”

  “You bet. There’s perch, bluegill—”

  “And catfish,” Tate added. “And snakes and turtles, and ducks, but they usually fly away. So do the geese.”

  “Sounds like a busy place.”

  “Nah,” Ben said. “It’s quiet.”

  Ben hadn’t been kidding. It was quiet at the pond. If you didn’t count the wind and the birds and the frogs and the mooing of one cow after another as the eight or ten head of bovine across the fence greeted them.

  Both boys jumped out and opened the gate in the barbwire fence. Pops drove through on the dirt drive, and there the grass took over, some of it nearly as tall as the boys. After the boys closed the gate and hopped back in, Pops took off across the grass at an angle, heading toward a scattering of trees near the far corner.

  “You’ll like the pond,” Ben told him.

  “Yeah,” Tate agreed. “It’s cool. It’s got a fishing pier and everything.”

  Wade saw as they pulled up and parked beneath a huge cottonwood that someone had built a wooden pier extending about six feet out over the water and running approximately ten to twelve feet along the bank. The red, muddy water lapped more than a foot below.

  “Here we are,” Dixie said.

  All four doors popped open at once. The boys took off for the pond.

  “Hey, you two,” Dixie called. “Get back here and help unload.”

  The boys took a few more running leaps, which put them at water’s edge next to the pier and sent three frogs plopping into the pond. The boys danced around for a few seconds, staring down at the water, then, grinning wide, turned and raced back to do what they’d been told.

  The family had unloading and setting things up down to a fine art. Dixie was as organized at this as she was at the diner. Within a matter of minutes, with everyone following the orders she issued in rapid-fire manner, everything was done.

  Wade blinked. Beneath the cottonwood nearest the pond sat a row of three lawn chairs next to a large quilt spread out on the ground. On the quilt sat an ice chest filled with juice and soft drinks, a couple of paper sacks containing lunch makings, and a stack of towels and rags. Fishing gear rested on the wooden dock a few feet away.

  Several yards away, out in the open, lay the trunks of two fallen trees. Near them lay a blackened ring of rocks obviously used to contain many a fire.

  As if on signal, Ben and Tate simultaneously pounced on the ice chest and each pulled out a drink.

  “This is a serve-yourself picnic,” Dixie told Wade. “I’ll make sandwiches later. You want anything before then, you’re on your own.”

  “Boy,” he muttered. “The service sure went downhill.”

  “I heard that,” she said. “Service didn’t go downhill, it took the day off.”

  “Yeah?” Pops wanted to know. “How do I get the day off?”

  “Easy,” she answered. “Don’t catch any fish.” To Wade she said, “He has to fry whatever they catch.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t do it right,” Pops complained. “She’s always gotta add flour to the cornmeal, and everybody knows it’s better if you roll the fish in plain cornmeal.”

  “At least I got you to quit using salt on it,” Dixie fired back.

  “I can see you two are serious about your fish frying,” Wade said.

  “If there’s anything in this world worth getting serious about,” Pops told him, “it’s a fish fry.” The old man gave him a fake glare and raised his fists as if to fight.

  “Hey.” Wade put his hands up in surrender. “You won’t get an argument out of me.”

  Pops nodded sharply. “Good enough, then.”

  “Come on, Pops,” Tate called from the dock. “Before we catch all the fish!”

  “More potato salad?”

  Wade pooched out his cheeks like an overstuffed squirrel. “No, thanks. I don’t think there’s room. Everything was delicious.”

  “Thanks.” Her smile teased at him.

  Wade smiled back. “Ahh. You made it? Not Pops?”

  “I honestly can cook,” she claimed. “At home he eats my cooking every day without complaint. He just doesn’t like the way I fry fish. But if I fixed it my way, I guarantee he’d eat it. He’d complain about it, but he’d eat it.”

  They sat for a while, the two of them, in companionable silence, and watched Pops and the boys on the pier. Out in the sunlight it was downright hot, but the air where they sat in the shade of the cottonwood was soft and warm and stirred slightly by the breeze.

  “This is a pretty place,” Wade said. And she was a pretty woman. The wind teased her hair. Every few minutes she brushed errant strands out of her face. Dappled light, filtered through the cottonwood leaves, drew shifting patterns across her face, her arms, the quilt. “I can see why you like to come here.” Personally, he could have sat there with her forever.

  “Yes.” Dixie took in a deep breath, let it out. “One of the best things Jimmy Don ever did was hang on to this land. I didn’t think he had it in him. He wasn’t one to hold on to things,” she explained. “Came as a shock when he died and we found out he still owned this place.”

  “You thought he’d sold it?”

  “You’d have to have known my ex to understand what a big deal his kee
ping this land really was. Jimmy Don rarely had two cents to rub together. Money slid through his hands like water.”

  “You didn’t know that about him when you married him?” Wade closed his eyes and shook his head. “Sorry. Not my business.”

  Dixie laughed. “You’re right, it’s not. But, yes, I knew that about him when I married him. He’d been my boyfriend since first grade.”

  “First grade, wow.”

  “Yeah.” She arched her neck and looked up at the sky. “Wow. We went steady for twelve years, but were married for only nine. You ever been married?”

  “Me? No.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you, but that seems incredible.”

  Wade grinned. “Is that a compliment?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Then thank you. But why does it seem incredible?”

  “Fishing for more?”

  “Fishing?” With a groan, Wade rolled his eyes toward the pier.

  “Okay, sorry. No pun intended. But let’s face it. You’re a good-looking guy.”

  “Aw, shucks, ma’am,” he said in his best imitation of a Texas drawl.

  “Too good-looking for your own good, maybe,” she added.

  “And that means I should have been married by now?”

  “Why not? You look like you could have any woman you want. What the devil are you doing in Podunk, Texas, hanging around somebody like me?”

  “Hey, don’t sell yourself short, boss. What do you mean, somebody like you?”

  She shrugged. “You know. Single mother, average looks, workaholic.”

  Wade shook his head slowly. “You obviously don’t see yourself the way I see you.”

  “Oh? And how is that?”

  “Now who’s fishing for compliments?” he teased.

  “Touché.”

  “But to answer your question—”

  “No, please.” She rolled her eyes and waved her hands. “Forget I asked.”

  “If you get to embarrass me, I get to embarrass you,” he said with a smile.