Page 3 of Dear Blue Jean Cowboy
"Yes, thank you," I grumble. "As I said, it was a long time ago. We've both moved on, and I'd like to avoid any unnecessary drama while she's here."
“I just think that you should—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“If you could just—”
“What did Ijustsay?”
“That you don’t want to talk about it.”
“And what are you doing?”
“Still talking about it.”
Out of all my siblings, besides Beau, Dani is the one I'm closest with, but sometimes I forget the years between us. So often, she acts beyond her age, but then there are moments like right now where her youngest child personality rears its ugly head. She gets an idea, and she won't let it go until she gets what she wants.
"I have to get some work done in the barn, so in less, you want to stick around and help out, you better get back to planning the festival."
I can see the struggle in Dani’s eyes. She wants to push me to talk to Diana about performing at the festival but thinks better of it—for the moment.
I wait until I hear the sound of her tires moving down the dirt drive before I walk over to the closet and pull out the shoebox off the top shelf. I haven't pulled this thing out in years. It still brings back too many painful memories that I don't like to think about.
I open the lid and look over the remnants of mine and Diana’s relationship that I couldn’t stand to get rid of after it was over. The rodeo buckle I won when I was first trying to catch her attention. The movie ticket stubs from our first date. Her lucky scrunchie she gave to me when I competed on the rodeo circuit. A small leather notebook that she used to write song ideas in. And a faded photo of the two of us sitting in my truck on the night we planned to run away together and get married.
I can still remember that everything about that moment when we took the picture. I was so happy, but I had no idea that my happiness would be so short-lived.
We were so naïve back then to think that we could get away with our plan to forge our parents' signatures on the consent forms and marry in secret. I wanted to make it big on the rodeo circuit, and Diana was going to write and sell her songs. We had our lives planned out.
I stare down at our young smiling faces.
We couldn’t have known then how differently our lives would turn out.
3
DIANA
I haven't even been here a whole twenty-four hours, and I'm already looking for an escape hatch to get out of my parents' house.
They made it about a whole ten seconds after me walking in the door yesterday to lay on the guilt thick about stopping at Mirabelle’s and not coming straight to the house.
“What will people think?” Mom asks me, but I have enough sense to know that this is a rhetorical question and not to answer.
“Really, Diana,” Dad chides. “You know how people talk in this town.”
"They'll think I'm such a terrible mother that my own daughter doesn't come to visit her first," Mom continues.
“Whoa, Mom,” Nora whispers as she carries in my new nephew swaddled in a blue crocheted blanket. “Way to make everything we do come down to your mothering skills. Can we let Diana take a breath before you lay into her?”
“Thank you," I mouth to my sister before saying out loud, "Is that my little nephew Devin?"
My parents backed off as best they could for the rest of the night, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the subject of my absence was brought up again, and my mother would make it all about her.
Nora anticipated this being a possible issue and picked me up early the following morning to save me from the Spanish Inquisition over the breakfast table. She distracted them with the sweet scent of Devin's head as I got dressed, and we ran out of the house, giving them vague plans of where we were going and when we'd be back.
“You know what Mom’s going to say when we get back,” I chuckle.
Nora rolls her eyes and clears her throat to impersonate our mom. “When you girls were young, I never left you with a babysitter, not even my mother, until you were five years old.”
