I was sitting on a log in the back yard, at the tedious stage of butchering chickens when you pull off the teeniest feathers. He came around the corner of the house.
He stopped, left some distance between us.
“You never came to get your pickup truck that you won.”
“That’s fine.” I went back to my job.
When he saw that he was not going to engage me in conversation, he turned on his heels, saying over his shoulder, “Keys’re in the ignition.”
After putting the plucked chickens in the refrigerator, I went to the driveway, where, to my surprise, there it was, the 1963 Chevy pickup with an extra-long bed that I had won from him in a bet. Beat up, but in far better shape than what I was currently driving, which had no windows.
A year or so before, I was one of two young women in a cowboy bar mostly filled with rough skinned cowboys and ranchers. The other woman was my friend who had enticed me to this high cold sagebrush desert place from Massachusetts, where we are both from, by saying that a person could get paid $25 a day to herd cattle from horseback.
The bar offered the only social life for hundreds of miles. Sunny sidled up, bought me a drink and we leaned against the bar. I’d heard of him, raised by the grandmother of the rancher whose place I lived on, recently retired from being a California Highway Patrolman and working as a foreman on a ranch north of town.
He teased, “You’re too soft to survive a winter where it gets to be 30 below.”
I replied, “People from Massachusetts are tough.”
“I bet my pickup truck that a year from today day, you won’t be living here.”
I bet my new mare. We shook on it.
But a voice inside my head said, “If I lose, there’s no way I am giving my mare to this guy.”
Sunny and I became a couple and shortly after that, I moved in with him. One evening, he was giving me a hard time.
“You shouldn’t be haying for the Cockrells. You should be here, makin’ supper. Cleanin’ fer Chrissakes. You ever noticed that the top of the cabinets needs dusting?”
I was insulted, irritated. I liked that job, was proud to have it.
He had made mashed potatoes and burgers for supper. Without thinking, I took a handful of those potatoes and smashed them into his face.
He pulled off his glasses, shoved them toward me, “Clean these!”
I refused. He carried me to the mudroom and hurled me to the floor. Hard.
I got up and ran out of the house. Quickly bridled my horse and rode bareback into town, which was so small, it didn’t have a post office or a church. But it had a payphone. Called a friend.
“Can you pick me up?”
My friend knew Sunny, he was like family. Her mother-in-law had raised him because his itinerant parents couldn’t. She also knew from Sunny’s ex-wife that he was a wife beater.
“Nancy, you all right?”
“I’m a little shaken but I’m OK.”
“I’ll be there as fast as I can. Gotta hook the trailer up to the truck.”