Triple Exposure by Colleen Thompson Page B

twenty years he had avoided his. Had it really been for his mother’s sake, or had simple cowardice kept him rooted to this speck on the Texas roadmap?
    “What do we do?” An anguished, young voice rose from the distant past. “We can’t let anyone — oh, goddammit. My scholarship—my dad’ll kill me.”
    Zeke forced back the memory.
    “Rachel’s being sued, you know that?” Patsy flicked her cloth across a tiny salt spill at the table’s center. “Civil court, for damages. Ten million, by the mother. That boy’s mama, she’ll destroy us. Destroy everything we’ve worked for, everything we’ll ever have. Bad enough, coming up with bail and keeping Rachel out of prison. But now we have to—”
    “I don’t understand.” He shook his head in confusion. “Can they come after you, too?”
    But he was thinking about Rachel, who had come here to regroup, recover. Rachel, who had helped him catch his horse and made him laugh.
    Patsy gave a snort. “Course not, but that doesn’t matter. She hasn’t got a pot to pee in, but she still needs defending. And her father’s hired a new lawyer to file a response, since the old one says civil courts aren’t his ‘specialty.’ What’s Walter’s is Rachel’s, he tells me—which means what’s ours is hers, too, including the business I’ve worked at like a damned dog all these years, every bit of it on my own dime and my own steam. And I’m supposed to just put it on the table? Use it for collateral, all for a girl who can hardly stand to be in the same state with me?”
    Patsy’s resentment made sense to Zeke. Day after day, he’d watched her work like a rented mule to run this place on her own, a business she’d built years before she’d married Walter Copeland. Still, he felt the need to put in, “I’ve never heard her say a word against you.”
    “Doesn’t mean she hasn’t thought ’em. Rachel’s never seen me as any more than a piss-poor substitute for the mama she lost. Pretty mama, and oh so perfect—one hell of a lot better than Plain Patsy from the café.”
    Zeke had no idea what to say to that, but Patsy expected no comment. He was a sounding board and no more. It was all he had to offer any woman, even a woman who’d been the closest thing he’d had to a friend for all these years.
    Another glider swooped gracefully and landed. It was Walter Copeland with what Zeke thought was a student pilot. Patsy glanced at Rachel jogging in her father’s direction, then looked back at Zeke, her expression sour. Jealous, he thought, and wishing her stepdaughter had remained back East where she belonged.
    “For your own sake,” Patsy said, “you ought to head home and go on about your business. You don’t want to get tied up in this. You don’t want to end up hurt for a girl who’sitching to run off to some big city the second she’s able. She’ll do it, too, when she’s wrung everything she can from Marfa. And from us.”
    Zeke stood and pushed in his chair.
    “Guess I’d better get back to it. Lunch was good,” he managed. More words than usual for him, but fewer than the flock that flapped around his head. Questions, mostly. Had Rachel withdrawn from him because she was upset about the lawsuit? Or was the friction within her family getting to her?
    Stay the hell out of it, he warned himself as he climbed back into the old pickup. He’d survived this long by keeping his life simple, clear of the complications that came with other people. Besides, now that he was getting around better, it was time to get back to work in earnest. The kind of hard, physical labor that would take his mind off the gnawing frustrations that took root in idleness. Maybe he’d trailer the horses to the Davis Mountains and ride out today, take an axe and break up some more wood. His mind recalled the twisted, desert deadfall he’d spotted on his last trip out there. It would make a fine headboard. Maybe he could fill in the mesquite’s natural gaps with some