Getting Lucky Read online

  She shook off the voice inside her head and set the groceries on the porch, found a key in her purse, and opened the front door. The living room was small with a kitchen through an archway straight ahead. An orange floral sofa sat on the north wall under a window covered with lace curtains. Tables on either end were covered with crocheted doilies topped off with orange ceramic lamps. An old, black dial telephone was on the end table toward the kitchen, a covered crystal dish full of hard butterscotch candy on the other. Fairly current copies of Ladies' Home Journal, Southern Living, and Better Homes and Gardens were neatly arranged on the coffee table, which did not match the end tables. The walls were painted a soft yellow and decorated with watercolor paintings, all signed E. Lassiter in the corner. A leather recliner on the west wall faced a floor model television set from the '80s—but it still worked and that's all that mattered to Julie. It had all reminded her of Mayberry when she'd looked at it the first time. Right then she felt more as though it had segued into the Twilight Zone.

  Mother and daughter carried their bags to the kitchen, the only modern room in the house. It was as if Aunt Bea from Mayberry had put together the house and Martha Stewart had designed the kitchen—new wood cabinets, stainless steel stove with double door refrigerator to match, dishwasher, trash compacter, heavy duty mixer and blender.

  The wood table and four chairs were as out of place as a kitten at a dog fight, though. The white paint was chipped and the chairs mismatched, so Martha Stewart must have lost the fight for something made of glass and brass.

  Julie put the food away and sighed. It had looked like a blessing when she first saw the place. She wouldn't have to move furniture or think about things like towels and bed linens. She could paint the outside of the house herself, and it was so small, the roof shouldn't cost too much. She loved to garden and it was still producing. And they'd be away from everyone. People who kept looking at Annie, their eyes betraying their thoughts: What happened? Julie was such a good girl. Did every thing right and married well. When did she have the affair that made her husband divorce her? And where was Annie's father, anyway? It had to have been his genes that gave her that white streak in the front of her coal-black hair. Must be a low-down, good-for nothing, worthless bastard not to even come around to see his daughter.

  Julie had wanted a baby so badly, had tried every fertility drug known to doctors, and was thinking about adoption when suddenly, after that weekend in Cancun, she was pregnant. It seemed as though God was telling her that she belonged with Derrick after all and working out their problems had been the right answer. It didn't take long for her to figure out it was Lucifer, not God, meddling in her life.

  Julie put thoughts of the past away and faced the present. She had boxes to unpack. Closets to clean. Cabinets to rearrange.

  "Momma, can I change clothes and go play with the kittens?" Annie asked.

  "Sure, you can. But stay in the backyard and don't go near the road."

  Annie giggled. "Momma, there ain't no road in the backyard. That's in the front yard. Lizzy said she's got some kittens, too. Did you know that?"

  Julie hugged Annie. "Okay, I stand corrected. Go play with the kittens. Take that quilt from the back of the recliner in the living room and spread it out to sit on. And no, I did not know that Lizzy had kittens at her house."

  "Not house, Momma. Ranch. Lizzy lives on a big ranch and Chuck has goats in his yard. Can we get a goat, Momma?"

  Julie shivered. "No ma'am, we are not having goats. They'd eat up my garden. Your mother cat and those kittens are enough livestock for us."

  Annie took off down the hall toward her bedroom like a shot. In minutes she'd changed from her white sundress into denim shorts and a faded T-shirt. She ran through the kitchen, the small utility room barely big enough for a washer and dryer, and out the back door into the yard where five kittens met her meowing and begging to be petted.

  Julie headed down the hallway, which had a doorway on the left to one bedroom, one on the right to the second one, and a bathroom at the very end. Annie's bedroom had an old, iron full-sized bedstead painted pink with white daisies on the headboard, an oak six-drawer dresser, and matching chest of drawers that would prob ably bring more at an antique auction than Julie paid for the house. A pale blue chenille bedspread with a basket of pink flowers covered the bed, which had been made up with ironed sheets and pillowcases.

  "Enjoy the wrinkle-free linens, my child," Julie mumbled. "Because this lady doesn't iron sheets or pillowcases, even if Miss Edna did."

  Julie's bedroom had a four-poster oak bed with matching ten-drawer dresser and five-drawer chest, one nightstand, and a modern lamp that looked as out of place as a pig at a Sunday afternoon social. An off-white chenille spread covered the bed. The pillowcases were embroidered with peacocks and matched the scarves on every piece of furniture in the room.

  "Straight out of the Sears & Roebuck catalog in 1958. Why did it all look so charming to me two weeks ago?" she mumbled as she changed into a pair of cut-off jeans and an orange tank top with bleach stains on the front. She pulled her thick, naturally curly red hair up into a high ponytail, and wiped sweat from her face. She'd had central air in her previous apartment, so she'd have to get used to adjusting window units in each room. She tucked the lace curtains back, looked out the window at Annie, still playing with five balls of fur, and turned on the noisy air conditioner. Her goal was to clean out the closet in her bedroom that afternoon and not to think about the striking cowboy named Griffin Luckadeau who she'd thought of for years as a soldier named G. Luckadeau.

  Griffin and Lizzy ordered ice cream cones at the Dairy Queen but he could scarcely eat his. He dreaded taking Lizzy home. Marita would have a thousand questions the first time Lizzy started in about the little girl with the white streak just like hers. He didn't mind answering questions if he had answers, but there were none. One minute he was living in his own little chunk of Montague County, minding his own business, and then this morning it all fell apart. He damn sure couldn't pull answers out of his ass to satisfy Marita.

  Who was that schoolteacher, anyway? And how'd she get a Luckadeau child? He knew how the child was made. But short of his mother having another son she never told anyone about, he didn't know anything else. Griffin's mother had inherited her white streak from her father and that was where Griffin's came from. His sister, Melinda, got the Luckadeau blond hair and her two sons were trademark Luckadeaus. Griffin had the poliosis streak in his hair, and Lizzy had inherited the gene from him. If it ran true, she'd give it to her sons but not her daughters.

  It was a rare birthmark and when Lizzy was born with it she had been tested for every conceivable disease, from Marfan's syndrome to Waardenburg's syndrome, but it was simply a genetic trait where the front forelock had no pigment.

  He might have dismissed seeing the same birthmark on the other little girl if she hadn't had the Luckadeau blue eyes to go with it, as well as the cheekbones and that little dimple in her chin. There was no doubt that child was as much Luckadeau as Lizzy. Hell, she looked like her twin: Lizzy was barely taller and the other girl a few pounds heavier, but then that's the way it was with twins most of the time.

  He stared out the Dairy Queen window.

  "Daddy, Annie is my friend. She and Chuck are my bestest friends. We played together all day. Annie has kittens and Chuck has some goats. Can we get a goat?" Lizzy asked.

  "I don't know, honey. What are Annie and Chuck's last names?"

  "You know, Daddy. Annie is Miss Julie's girl. Her name is Donavan and Chuck is Chuck Chester."

  Graham swallowed hard. He hadn't wanted to let Lizzy go to school that year and he'd been right. The son of the biggest meth producer in Montague County had become her best friend the first day; and then there was the mystery behind her new teacher, who Mrs. Amos told him was a single mother and a fine teacher. Mrs. Amos must be getting old and losing her touch. Used to be she had eyes in the back of her head and was the meanest teacher in school, when Gri
ffin was a child.

  "Did you see Lizzy's hair, Daddy? She's got a lucky streak in her hair and blue eyes and nobody better call us a skunk and if they did we could both beat them up and…" she finally stopped for air.

  "What you have is not common, but you aren't the only little girl in the world with it. That little girl has one, too. We'll have no more talk about beating people up. No one has called you a skunk since that party at Slade's house."

  "But they will because that's what I look like. Can we make it go away, daddy? I don't want to be different. Me and Annie could put stuff on our hair and make it go away," she said.

  "No, we cannot make it go away, Lizzy. It's what makes you special. Remember what Jane told you that day at Slade's ranch? She said only little girls with lucky streaks can find the pot of gold."

  "Then me and Annie will be special together. Can we fix Chuck's hair to match ours so he will be special?" Lizzy asked.

  "Is Chuck that little red-haired boy who has freckles and wears glasses?" Griffin remembered the child Julie had been consoling when he walked into the room. "Are you sure his name is Chester? His hair looked like your new teacher's hair. Maybe that's her son."

  Lizzy scooped up the last of her ice cream sundae. "No, Daddy. He is Chuck Chester. His Momma come to the school before you got there. She's not nice. She yelled at Chuck and made him cry. Miss Julie only has Annie."

  Griffin pushed his white forelock back with his fingertips. "Maybe his Momma was having a tough day. Let's get on home and see if Nana Rita is making cookies. I bet she is and you can help her. And Carl needs the feed in the back of our truck so we have to unload that. We've got lots of jobs to do."

  "Okay." She drew the word out with a sigh. "I like school. I wish I could live there or that Annie could come live with me."

  He didn't answer such an absurd proclamation. He helped Lizzy into the backseat of his club cab truck and drove north out of Saint Jo.

  "Daddy, look. Hurry, right there where the old witch used to live—there is Annie and Miss Julie getting out of their truck. Can I go play with her today, Daddy? That old witch woman isn't still in the house, is she?" Lizzy bounced around in the backseat, only the seat belt keeping her from barreling out of the truck and running toward the ramshackle house that Edna Lassiter had lived in for more than fifty years.

  So the woman had actually bought property in Saint Jo. He'd heard that it sold to a schoolteacher. Folks didn't buy property unless they were planning on sticking around because it would be years before they could unload it. Griffin gritted his teeth, slapped the steering wheel, and swore under his breath, then imme diately looked in the rearview mirror to see if Lizzy had heard him. She was too busy looking at the house to hear anything. Of all the kids in the classroom, why did she have to befriend those two?

  The Lucky Clover Ranch property started a mile out of Saint Jo and covered most of the ground on the east side of the road from there to Capps Corner. Then he owned a fair-sized chunk of land on up toward Illinois Bend, a small community on the border of the Red River. It had a church and a few scattered houses. Capps Corner was only slightly bigger. Saint Jo had less than a thousand people, and Alvera Clancy said that was counting the dogs and depending on several girls to get pregnant and keep up the population. Why would any single mother come to Saint Jo?

  He made a right-hand turn down the paved lane, through a brick and wooden arch with a swinging sign at the top. The ranch brand, a four leaf clover, was burned into the wood on either side of the words, Welcome to the Lucky Clover Ranch. It was the truth: everyone was welcome at the ranch.

  Everyone except Edna Lassiter, who had kept a hundred-year-old feud alive with the Luckadeau family. She had gone to the courthouse once a year to file a restraining order on anyone with the last name of Luckadeau or anyone who might be kin to those heathens, as she called the whole family. As if he or any of his family preceding him would have any business on that ramshackle property of hers. There was an old rumor that it went back farther than her generation— something about a Lassiter being jilted by a Luckadeau a hundred years before.

  Edna had been a recluse except for Sunday morning services, so not many people even knew she existed. However, there was that day that she called Lizzy the spawn of the devil when Lizzy bumped into her cane in the church parking lot. Lizzy would spit out a cuss word as slick as scum on a farm pond, but she whispered the word spawn anytime she used it, and had been terrified of the elderly gray-haired woman after that.

  Griffin wondered why in the world a schoolteacher would buy that property. The house was probably haunted and if the inside looked like the outside, no one would want to live there.

  Lizzy opened the truck door and bailed out, taking off in a dead run toward the two-story ranch house with a porch around three sides on both the bottom and upper floors. Painted white, it sat in a grove of pecan trees and had a white picket yard fence all around it. Lizzy left the gate hanging with a yell for her father to close it and went tearing into the house hollering for Nana Rita.

  "Right here, child. What is the matter?" A thin Mexican lady emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on the tail of her apron. Her black hair was pulled up into a bun on top of her head. Her jeans bagged slightly on her slim frame, and a red T-shirt peeked out from under a bibbed apron made of red gingham checks.

  "There's another me. She's in my room, Nana Rita, and her name is Annie. She's got a streak in her hair just like mine and blue eyes just like mine and even a dent in her chin. Her momma is my teacher, Miss Julie, and she's got curly red hair but she don't have a lucky streak in her hair. Is Annie my sister? Why didn't Daddy tell me I have a sister just like me?"

  "Because you don't," Griffin said from the doorway.

  Marita tucked her chin and raised an eyebrow. The questions were on the way and he still didn't have an answer for any of them.

  "She might be my twin sister. We're just alike," Lizzy argued.

  "I was there in the delivery room when your mother gave birth to you. Believe me, you were just one baby," Griffin said.

  "But I want her to be my twin sister. Can you go buy her so she can be?" Lizzy asked.

  "No, he cannot buy a little girl. Now you come in this kitchen with me and help me make cookies. You can tell me more about this little girl while we cook. And you"—Marita pursed her lips—"can tell me about the new teacher later."

  Griffin nodded. At least he wouldn't have to go into the whole thing that day. Maybe by the time he did have to discuss it, he'd have more information. He'd heard that everyone had a double somewhere in the world. Evidently, Lizzy had found hers on the first day of school. Probably by the time they were in school a week they'd be fighting and wouldn't be friends anymore. Or maybe the teacher would be gone when he took Lizzy to school the next day.

  Julie opened the closet doors to the slightly sweet smell of baby powder and an old woman's cologne. Starting at one end she took down dresses and pantsuits—some of which had to be thirty years old, judging from the mate rial and style—and folded them neatly into big black garbage bags to take to the nearest Goodwill store.

  When she picked up the pink floral, double-knit dress she sat down in the floor and leaned back against the wall. Her aunt Flossie had a dress just like that and had worn it to the hospital to see her when Annie was born. She'd taken one look at the baby and quickly came to the same conclusion Derrick had.

  "That baby is beautiful, but she does not belong to your husband. You've been sinning, Julie Donavan, and it has come back to bite you on the ass," Aunt Flossie whispered. Julie had been as surprised to hear that word come out of Aunt Flossie's mouth as she'd been when they laid the new baby in her arms the first time. Aunt Flossie didn't even use the word pregnant in mixed company and said it behind her hand when she absolutely had to use it among female friends. Most of the time the guilty party was "in the family way."

  That damned pink dress brought on a flood of memories Julie thought she'd buried and faced for the
last time several years ago. She'd moved from Jefferson, Texas, to Saint Jo to get away from the gossip and here it was, following her around like a puppy in the form of a blasted pink double-knit dress with a zipper down the front. Along with one fine-looking cowboy who didn't even remember who she was. Had Aunt Flossie still been alive, she would have blushed at the string of scalding words that flowed from her niece's mouth right then.

  It had all started when Julie discovered her husband Derrick had been sleeping with the female engineer in the oil company his family owned. Julie and Derrick had been married six years and she had tried every fertility drug and concept on the market to have a baby. When she confronted him about the affair, he'd declared with bravado that it was her obsession with pregnancy that had driven him to the other woman. It was all Julie's fault because sex had become nothing but a means to a baby, not a spontaneous spark of fun like it had been in the beginning. Pompous son-of-a-bitch that he was, he'd laid a guilt trip on her.

  "Yeah, right," Julie said aloud. "He unzipped his pants. I damn sure didn't do it for him, grab his tally whacker, and lead him to the cute little engineer."